Category Archives: gps hacks

Handheld GPS Tracks All The Things

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With a GPS on every smartphone, one would be forgiven for forgetting that handheld GPS units still exist. Seeking to keep accurate data on a few upcoming trips, [_Traveler] took on a custom-build that resulted in this GPS data logger.

Keeping tabs on [_Traveler] is a Ublox M8N GPS which is on full-time, logging data every 30 seconds, for up  to 2.5 days. All data is saved to an SD card, with an ESP32 to act as a brain and make downloading the info more accessible via WiFi . While tracking the obvious — like position, speed, and time — …read more

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Opt-Out Fitness Data Sharing Leads to Massive Military Locations Leak

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People who exercise with fitness trackers have a digital record of their workouts. They do it for a wide range of reasons, from gathering serious medical data to simply satisfying curiosity. When fitness data includes GPS coordinates, it raises personal privacy concerns. But even with individual data removed, such data was still informative enough to spill the beans on secretive facilities around the world.

Strava is a fitness tracking service that gathers data from several different brands of fitness tracker — think Fitbit. It gives athletes a social media experience built around their fitness data: track progress against personal goals …read more

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A Talking Clock For The 21st Century

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The Talking Clock service is disappearing, and it’s quite possible that few of you will be aware of its passing. One of the staples of twentieth-century technology, the Talking Clock service was the only universally consumer-available source of accurate time information away from hourly radio time signals in the days before cheap radio-controlled clocks, or GPS. You’d dial (on a real dial, naturally!) a telephone number, to be greeted with a recorded voice telling you what the time would be at the following beep. Clocks were set, phone companies made a packet, and everybody was happy with their high-tech audio …read more

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Geocache Locator Is The Gift That Keeps On Giving

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Depending on how you look at things, the holidays could be seen as either an excuse to spend money or an excuse to get creative. We imagine many Hackaday readers would rather head to their workbench than the mall when it comes time for gift giving, and [Sean Hodgins] is no different. He came up with the idea of hiding geocaches around his nephew’s neighborhood and building him a locator device to find them. The locator itself is intended to grow with his nephew, allowing him to reprogram it or use its parts for something completely different down the road. …read more

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Snail is Actually Cleverly Strange Geocaching Waypoint

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Basic geocaching consists of following GPS coordinates to a location, then finding a container which is concealed somewhere nearby. Like any activity, people tend to add their own twists to keep things interesting. [Jangeox] recently posted a video of the OLED Snail 2.0 to show off his most recent work. (This is a refinement of an earlier version, which he describes in a blog post.)

[Jangeox] spices up geocaching by creating electronic waypoints, and the OLED Snail is one of these. Instead of GPS coordinates sending someone directly to a goal, a person instead finds a waypoint that reveals another …read more

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Don’t Miss Watching this Solar Eclipse High Altitude Balloon Online

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[Dan Julio] let us know about an exciting project that he and his team are working on at the Solid State Depot Makerspace in Boulder: the Solar Eclipse High Altitude Balloon. Weighing in at 1 kg and bristling with a variety of cameras, the balloon aims to catch whatever images are able to be had during the solar eclipse. The balloon’s position should be trackable on the web during its flight, and some downloaded images should be available as well. Links for all of that are available from the project’s page.

High altitude balloons are getting more common as a …read more

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The Perfect Tourist Techno-Cap

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How many times are you out on vacation and neglect to take pictures to document it all for the folks back at home? Or maybe you forgot just exactly where that awesome waterfall was. [Mark Williams] has made a Raspberry Pi Zero enabled cap that can take photos and geotag them with the location as well as the attitude of the camera.

The idea is to enable the reconstruction of a trip photographically. The hardware consists of a Raspberry Pi Zero W coupled with a Raspberry Camera V2 and a BerryGPS-IMU. Once activated, the system starts taking photos every two …read more

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The Perfect Tourist Techno-Cap

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How many times are you out on vacation and neglect to take pictures to document it all for the folks back at home? Or maybe you forgot just exactly where that awesome waterfall was. [Mark Williams] has made a Raspberry Pi Zero enabled cap that can take photos and geotag them with the location as well as the attitude of the camera.

The idea is to enable the reconstruction of a trip photographically. The hardware consists of a Raspberry Pi Zero W coupled with a Raspberry Camera V2 and a BerryGPS-IMU. Once activated, the system starts taking photos every two …read more

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GPS Tracker Gets SMS Upgrade

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In May of 2000, then-President Bill Clinton signed a directive that would improve the accuracy of GPS for anyone. Before this switch was flipped, this ability was only available to the military. What followed was an onslaught of GPS devices most noticeable in everyday navigation systems. The large amount of new devices on the market also drove the price down to the point where almost anyone can build their own GPS tracking device from scratch.

The GPS tracker that [Vadim] created makes use not just of GPS, but of the GSM network as well. He uses a Neoway M590 GSM …read more

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A Beverage Cooler That Comes To You!

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Feel like taking a long walk, but can’t be bothered with carrying your drinks? Have no fear, this  “Follow Me” Cooler Bot is here!

Really just a mobile platform with a cooler on top, the robot connects to smartphone via Bluetooth, following it using GPS. Making the platform involves a little woodworking skill, and an aluminium hub with a 3D-printed hub adapter connects the motors to a pair 6″ rubber wheels with a swivel caster mounted at the rear. A pocket in the platform’s base houses the electronics.

The Arduino Uno — via an L298n motor driver — controls two …read more

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