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GPS
I’m an “old” (slow learner) mentor of team 1696 in Montana. We have just finished our FIRST regional competition for the 2008 season, and didn’t make it to Atlanta. We have a lot of open space here in Montana and I am a farmer who uses GPS in my farming operations. We have been working on making one of our old FIRST robots an outdoor machine, and I’d really like to try to incorporate some sort of gps steering onto this device as a way to keep kids interested in technology in the “off season”.
So what I’m looking for is a – pardon my lack of good jargon use – library that contains a serial (maybe Mr Kevin Watson serial stuff would work??) NMEA string parser, and maybe pull in some math libraries we’d need.
The way GPS is used in agriculture is for guidance and input for assisted steering. There are many patterns available, but the main two I use is a straight “AB” line and a straight “A+” line. The AB line is developed by physically driving the unit to the first place (point A) and storing that location, then driving to a second place (point B) and storing that location. We then have an electronic line. We have already dialed in a “Width” of our implement (distance between parallel lines) and thus we create a whole series of parallel lines that either we can follow OR cooler yet, that the machine can follow using assisted steering. I’d like to have our robot do this parallel swathing. (Humans have to turn the unit around at the ends of swaths and get it close to the next parallel line for the guidance to work on big machines, so that could be necessary here too).
The straight “A+” is done by setting the first point (A) and a heading, thus drawing a straight line from which parallels are drawn.
The reason I opened with “old” and slow learner is because I am learning EasyC with the kids, and I think we could implement a GPS guidance system if we could find some kind, smart person to put together a library for us, but I just don’t think we have the ability to get that library pulled together.
Might someone be willing to help put a GPS library together???
I’ve seen a few posts on Chief Delphi about gps, most asking for help. I think that once a serial com, parser and maybe a couple simple functions like drive to an input point or drive to point A, click button X, drive to point B, click button X, then create parallel lines happened, the community would be off and running.
BTW – the accuracies would mostly be a function of the GPS unit used. There are many GPS units out there that put out NMEA 0183 strings, and some of them are pretty accurate – by using WAAS, some other satellite/base correction like OmniStar, or even RTK. The point is that they all use NMEA 0183, so the accuracy of our AB lines would just be a function of the GPS.
Maybe this is already done, and just needs to be dragged into EasyC so we can use it. If so, pls point me, THANKS
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