DIY Rat Race to the Pub with the LTE GNSS Breakout Board
Once Rob and Avra receive a text with GPS coordinates, who will get to the location fastest? They find out using trains, planes, bikes, blades, and of course the new SparkFun LTE GNSS Breakout with SARA-R5.
Rob, Cassy and I all have jam-packed life schedules, but always enjoy coming together to enjoy a drink and talk about the mysteries of life...like the ancient Roman aqueducts, or speakeasies in London.
In an attempt to meet up more often, we decided to build a pop-up party planner that would help us to find each other's locations and all meet at the same place.
However, there's a catch to this pop-up planner: Whoever arrives last has to buy the first round of drinks, so it's critical that once a text message is received, we race to the coordinates.
Of course, the perfect board for this is the new SparkFun LTE GNSS Breakout - SARA-R5, because it combines a 5G-ready wireless IoT device using the UBX-R5 cellular chipset, with the ability to gather positional data with the M8 GNSS receiver chipset. This is really ideal, because what good is knowing where you are, or something else is, if you can't communicate that to others? This breakout board specifically addresses that.
It's like peanut butter and jelly; GNSS and cellular!
We set out to develop the device in an enclosed briefcase for maximum transportability and discreteness, that sends the positional data of its location whenever the big red "party time" button is pressed. We also used the Artemis RedBoard and an external antenna for the project.
Essentially, the project combines two of the focal examples that come in the Arduino library: Example 1, which gathers the positional data, and Example 6, which sends SMS messages using the SARA. Now, it's triggered by the button to collect the positional data and communicate that via SMS, so it's really just simple code design - a button triggers data collection, which is then communicated cellularly.
It's also a helpful reminder that you don't always have to build code from scratch. One of the most efficient ways to develop the software for your project is to piece together code snippets for your specific needs!
So, whether you too want a party planner for your friends, or you want to develop an asset tracker for your unmanned vehicles, you can utilize the SparkFun LTE GNSS Breakout - SARA-R5 for whatever unique project you might have.
And be sure to watch the video to see who has to buy the first round...
Ready to get hands-on with GPS?
We've got a page just for you! We'll walk you through the basics of how GPS works, the hardware needed, and project tutorials to get you started.
After refilling my coffee cup, I happened to think of another "mash-up" that might be appropriate to this situation: "My cup runneth under" -- a "mash-up" of Psalm 23:5, to wit, "My cup runneth over", and the old computer error message of "Floating point underrun error" which you'd get back in the Ancient Times of FORTRAN and room-sized computers when a math result was too small to represent as a "float" but was clearly non-zero.
Anyway, I often say "My cup runneth under" before going for a refill...
Several decades ago I heard the expression "Plagiarism is the highest form of productivity", although if you have permission (for example, "open source examples" and giving required crediting) it's not really "plagiarism"...