Pushing information to a computer

[lerameur]

HI Dwight,
Thanks for the program ,
I would not mind the schematic.
How do you know what data to put in your SEROUT statement. I looked through the earthbridge web page but did not see any technical details.
Thanks
Ken

[Heckler]

Hi Ken,

I just looked through my stack of papers and notebooks and can't locate the schematic. I will keep looking.
It actually was quite simple... I used two BS170 FET's to allow the pic to power on/off the GPS module and the XBEE radio.
If you haven't used small FET's in this manner they work great. Very easy to interface to a PIC and control ~500 ma or so.
The radio pair that I used was a XBEE09P by Digi International (note: if you go XBEE they have nonstandard pin spacing so you may need a .1 inch adapter board so it will fit a breadboard)
They make several models of the XBEE radios, so if you decide to go that way, take a look at the various models and range capabilities.
SparkFun, Adafruit, digikey, (probably Amazon) all carry them
You can see in the code where I turn on/off the GPS and the XBEE radio, one after the other.

For shorter ranges you could also probably use the cheaper serial radios sold on ebay. http://www.ebay.com/itm/2pcs-433Mhz-...item1e869e9107
Or as you were thinking, bluetooth.

Here are a couple of pics of my little project.

To answer your question I think the earthbridge was able to parse the NEMA strings coming from the gps and pull out what was needed.
It has been over a year since I built this so I am a bit rusty. If you mock up the same thing I build you could just output the serial string that I was sending to the XBEE radio instead to a local LCD or to a serial terminal on your PC to have a look at it. ( I find having on hand an LCD with Serial Backpack invaluable for quick testing and debugging serial comms)

Actually I think you could just fire up earthbridge and recieve the serial string from the 12F683 directly into the serial port defined in earthbridge.
If you take a look at the code I posted you can see in the SEROUT and SERIN statements I did a little NEMA parsing as the data came in and before I sent it out.






The only component on the bottom of the board is a single diode (for reverse battery protection) and the wiring connections.
Notice on the PCB I included a 6 pin header strip to allow me to connect my PICKIT 2 to update the code in the PIC easily.
If I locate the schematic I will post it.