Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr.Bot
You should research a project called robo-magellan. This is a contest where
robots use GPS to locat an orange trraffic cone based on GPS co-ordinates.
Most GPS hand held units come with a serial or USB port now a days. Might be hard to interface with an IFF controller, but possiible even with a VEX.
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I have not done this however, my smartphone (and most Windows Mobile OS hand held devices with either USB or Bluetooth) can interface with something like the PHAROS GPS, and you can read the NMEA streams as COM devices. MS has GPS built into the latest version of Windows Mobile. Since we're not limited to the hardware that FIRST uses for this particular challenge you could potentially use a handheld device (probably be able to get one cheap on EBay) as a smart controller.
Microsoft has a free version of it's software for developing for Windows Mobile (Visual Studio 2008 lite) and I believe they may even have libraries for creating apps that at least interface with COM ports, if not also with the GPS itself. Then the only challenge would be outputting something that the VEX or other IFF controller can read for signalling.