Getting GPS to work on a Raspberry Pi. Peter writes –

One of the tasks I want to use a Raspberry PI for is to take over the duties of an existing ITX based linux box running my weather station. Now in theory that should be pretty simple as the current setup uses pywws to connect to the station and as that’s written in python it should work.

Now the Raspberry PI has no onboard Real time clock – which means it needs to use an NTP server to get the time when it starts. Usually you would use the default settings and allow the PI to connect to thenet for it’s time. Now this is fine if you have a working net connection but what if you are not connected to the net? You might be in the field running the PI on batteries.

As the other projects I have lined up for it is to connect my Meade LX200GPS telescope to the local network or to work with my (in prototype) radio telescopes so having an accurate clock is going to be required.

Now the obvious solution here is to use GPS as a time source. GPS works by having a constellation of satellites in orbit and each one carries a highly accurate atomic clock & broadcast both their current position and the time. A GPS receiver then receives these signals and, as long as it has enough satellites and workout where you are by comparing the times from those clocks.

So this article shows how to use A GPS receiver with the Rasperry PI – although these instructions are not specific to the PI.

We will also get this working with the Adafruit ultimate GPS – next week probably!

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi.