Qwiic phat v1.0 & GPS Breakout XA1110 Balloon Mode

Qwiic System
1

For my qwiic system setup I have a raspberry pi 3 B+ functioning as my microcontroller paired with the v1.0 phat & GPS Breakout XA1110.

Currently able to read GNSS data over I2C, and this setup works great.

I studied the following documentation provided:

https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/sp … okup-guide

I would like to set the GPS Breakout XA1110 to ‘Balloon mode’ in order to take advantage of the 80km altitude limit. How do I write PMTK packet (886, 3*2B) from my raspberry pi to the GPS Breakout XA1110 and read the current PMTK packet configuration via raspberry pi in python or c++?

I have been stuck on this for several days so any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

2

While we haven’t tested this functionality explicitly on the Raspberry Pi, I’m sure there is a way to make it work. Use at your own discretion.

I would suggest using either smbus with Python or wiringPi with C++. Using either library, you can write to the I2C bus. You’ll want to send a PMTK packet. Similarly, we’ve created functions to do just that for Arduino in our GitHub source files: https://github.com/sparkfun/SparkFun_I2 … y.cpp#L214. You’ll have to modify for the Raspberry Pi but it can be done.

3

I’ll see if I can get smbus with python working and reference the Arduino code accordingly.

Thanks for the help Brandon.