A Geek's Christmas gift

If anyone of you was ever in doubt - please know I am a certified geek.  Really.
With that out of the way, let me show you a picture of the gift I got from my lovely wife Holly:

What - most of you are thinking - the heck - is that???

It is a GPS chip, and yes, she only knew to get it because I put it on my Amazon wish list.  If you have not tried that before - it is a great way to share gift ideas, especially if you are tough giftee as I am.

So it is a GPS chip.  The key circuit included in most of the Garmin and TomTom GPS car navigation systems.  I have to take a quick detour here and just say that I am constantly amazed at the progress technology has made over the last 20 years.  I used to work at TRW (now a part of Northrop), and did some pretty sophisticated work with GPS satellites and missile tracking.  What used to be a box the size of a desktop computer (or bigger), plus some pretty heavy duty processing power, now easily fits in a device that is about the size of a wristwatch and can be powered off a couple AA batteries.

So after futzing around with gizmo for a while, I now have it assembled and working with an Arduino microprocessor (shown below):



I am now able to decode all the GPS data coming off the chip, and using an Excel macro, read and process the information in real time.  As with any new toy, I like to understand all the gory details before I start to use it in some project...

For example... the precision of the unit *could* get me to knowing my position (latitude, longitude and height) to within about half a foot.  Unfortunately, its accuracy is only about 5-10 meters.  Good enough for most car navigation, but not so hot for my needs.  I am hoping to be able to reduce the errors a little with some judicious algorithms after analyzing the errors to which the device is susceptible.

But the greatest improvement I will likely achieve is using a system with 2 GPS devices - one stationary, the other able to move about the vicinity.  The stationary GPS will be at a known location.  It will broadcast the error between where it thinks it is, and where it actually is - to the mobile GPS - allowing it to correct for systematic errors.
I would like to use this unit for some kind of autonomous vehicle that could rove the yard - at some point it may even have some function - but for now it is just fun to get something to work for the sake of it.

I know my posts are once a blue moon, but maybe, just maybe, I can try to make that happen instead once every moon.