Traffic Updates On The Seven Seas: Open Source Chart Plotter Using A Raspberry Pi

As the Raspberry Pi in its various forms continues to flow into the wild by the thousands, it’s interesting to see its user base expand outside beyond the hacker communities. One group of people who’ve also started taking a liking to it is sailing enthusiasts. [James Conger] is one such …read more

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Navigate Around Garmin’s Custom Map Limits

If your only experience with Garmins is from that one rental car a few years back, it may surprise you that some of them, mostly the handheld outdoor units, allow custom maps. This sounds cool until you find out the limitations. Unless you upgrade to premium, it doesn’t allow map …read more

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Maps to SMS, When You’re Really Far Away

GPS is available on most smart phones, which is all well and good unless you drive out into a place with weak service. Unless you want to go into the before-time and buy a standalone GPS (and try to update the maps every so often) or go even further back …read more

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100 Year Old Atomic Clock

Precision time is ubiquitous today thanks to GPS and WWVB. Even your Macbook or smartphone displays time which is synchronized to the NIST-F1 clock, a cesium fountain atomic clock (aka the ‘Atomic Clock’) that is part of a global consortium of atomic clocks known as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Without …read more

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Tracking the Satellites That Keep Us On Track; Monitoring GPS, Galileo, BeiDou, and GLONASS

We may not always be aware of it, but the daily function of the technological world around us is extremely dependent on satellite navigations systems. It helps the DHL guy deliver those parts you were waiting for, and keeps the global financial and communication systems running with precision timing. So, …read more

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This GPS Speedometer Hangs Off Your Handlebars

If you can ride a bike with no handlebars, no handlebars, no handlebars, you can do just about anything. You can take apart a remote control, and you can almost put it back together. You can listen in on a two meter repeater and you can build a GPS module …read more

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Meat-Seeking Raspberry Pi Leads you to Flavortown

[Patrick McDavid] and his wife had a legitimate work-related reason for writing some Python code that would pull the exact latitude and longitude of the individual locations within a national retain chain from Google’s Geocoding API. But don’t worry about that part of the story. What’s important now is that this simple concept was then expanded into a pocket-sized device that will lead the holder to the nearest White Castle or Five Guys location.

The device, which [Patrick] lovingly referrers to as the “Cheeseburger Compass”, uses a Raspberry Pi 3, an Adafruit 16×2 LCD with keypad, a GPS module, and …read more

Continue reading Meat-Seeking Raspberry Pi Leads you to Flavortown

Meat-Seeking Raspberry Pi Leads you to Flavortown

[Patrick McDavid] and his wife had a legitimate work-related reason for writing some Python code that would pull the exact latitude and longitude of the individual locations within a national retain chain from Google’s Geocoding API. But don’t worry about that part of the story. What’s important now is that this simple concept was then expanded into a pocket-sized device that will lead the holder to the nearest White Castle or Five Guys location.

The device, which [Patrick] lovingly referrers to as the “Cheeseburger Compass”, uses a Raspberry Pi 3, an Adafruit 16×2 LCD with keypad, a GPS module, and …read more

Continue reading Meat-Seeking Raspberry Pi Leads you to Flavortown

Where’s The Cat? Locating Your Moggy Without Eating Batteries

Where the Hackaday Cat goes when she steps over the threshold into the wider world is a mystery, she reveals her whereabouts strictly on her terms and would we suspect be very cagey were we able to ask her about it. [Andy C] however has a need to know where his cat is spending her time, so he’s made a GPS collar for a bit of feline spying.

There are commercial GPS collars for pets, but they all share the flaw of extremely limited battery life. His challenge then was to create a collar that delivered the required pinpoint fix …read more

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