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GIS

Garmin vs Arduino GPS dance-off

So I built a GPS logger. It’s an Arduino Uno with the SparkFun microSD and GPS shields. No display, massively unwieldy, but it does spit out a track point every second and logs it fairly reliably to microSD. It works as well as my expensive old Garmin GPSMap 60Csx, as a walk around the block shows:

Excuse the noise at the top of the trace; both units were brought inside. While they keep a tenuous lock, they certainly don’t give much accuracy. I think the Arduino did rather well; certainly better than my BlackBerry

Now all I need is a case and a more useful power supply. I was disappointed that a USB MintyBoost charger didn’t seem to work for long, causing the GPS to lock up.