Some slick gadget masters over at the part foundry have gotten GPS functionality working quite flawlessly on the iPhone. They’ve hacked together the hardware, which is mainly just a GPS unit and a microcontroller, and it plugs right into the serial port of your iPhone. It’s small enough to fit on your keychain, and when they ship it in February you won’t even need to solder anything - it’ll be packaged up real pretty-like. Furthermore, they’ve written a little program that polls the GPS satellite (after its warmed up) at up to once every second - that gives you your latitude and longitude, which you can send to Google Maps with a single touch. Sounds pretty sweet, and they’re even doing it all open source. Check out the video in the link.
iPhone GPS module at the part foundry
Update:
Curt at the part foundry has informed us that the locoGPS unit will also work with the iPod Touch. Sweet.
Comments
ever hear of a bluetooth gps antenna? ;)
Sadly, the iPhone Bluetooth is fairly crippled.
Yeah, the fact that the iphone bluetooth stack quite deliberately doesn’t support GPS (or printers or well pretty much anything useful) is pretty obnoxious and just frankly inexcusable. It’s shit like that the drives people back to MS crap products every time, the UI might suck but at least it works with other devices the way you would generally expect.
Devin, we being messing around with this on a device from HTC. Tell your gadget boys we’ll throw in some code if they want to play with it.
Wow, that’s *all* you need? Just an add-on that looks to make the whole thing 25% bigger in your hand and sucks battery life? Fantastic!
How do you pass lat and lon to the Maps application from shell or over ssh?
I’m stoked, i going to Australia and there alot of places that don’t have WiFi and the GPS (after its in full production) will be a life saver.
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