IS it possible to get UTM coordinates out of the Venus GPS module, or do I have to do the conversion on my own?
Thanks,
-Scott
Not possible AFAIK. No mention of it in the docs.
Yeah, I didn’t find anything either.
I ended up using four known lat-long/UTM pairs around the sparkfun HQ and simple bilinear interpolation to come up with a quick and accurate conversion from lat-long to UTM. It’s not global, but it works well enough.
Now I’ve got nice position information in meters! Good for the upcoming robot race.
-Scott
Well, if all you want is an X, Y coordinate pair measured in meters:
Y = Latitude * (10^7 meters/90 degrees)
X = Longitude * cos(Latitude) * (10^7 meters/ 90 degrees)
where Latitude and Longitude are the absolute mesurements reported by GPS, in degrees. If you are only navigating within, say, a few dozen miles of a reference point, just calculate cos(Latitude) for that point once and use the result in all subsequent calculations instead of recaclulating the cosine every time.
(the original definition of the meter was one ten-millionth the distace from the equator to the North Pole through Paris)