FeatherWing of the Day: Adafruit Ultimate GPS FeatherWing #WingOfTheDay
The Adafruit Feather ecosystem is so rich with hardware diversity, we wanted to share them, one each day. Today is the Adafruit Ultimate GPS FeatherWing!
Give your Feather a sense of place, with an Ultimate GPS FeatherWing. In 2013 we designed the Ultimate GPS module to satisfy all your GPS desires – and now we have brought its power and versatility plus more to our Feather series with the Adafruit Ultimate GPS FeatherWing! This FeatherWing plugs right into your Feather board and gives it a precise, sensitive, and low-power GPS module for location identification anywhere in the world. As a bonus, the GPS can also keep track of time once it is synced with the satellites.
Works with all Feathers except for those with USB-Serial converters that use the UART pins. Right now that means the Feather 328p, ESP8266 Huzzah Feather and nRF52832 Feather don’t work
Internal patch antenna + u.FL connector for external active antenna
Fix status LED
The Wing is built around the MTK3333 chipset, a no-nonsense, high-quality GPS+GLONASS module that can track up to 33 satellites on 99 channels, has an excellent high-sensitivity receiver (-165 dB tracking!), and a built-in antenna. It can do up to 10 location updates a second for high speed, high sensitivity logging, or tracking. Power usage is incredibly low, only 30 mA during navigation.
The MTK3333-based module has external antenna functionality. The module has a standard ceramic patch antenna that gives it -165 dB sensitivity, but when you want to have a bigger antenna, you can snap on any 3V active GPS antenna via the uFL connector. The module will automatically detect the active antenna and switch over! Most GPS antennas use SMA connectors so you may want to pick up one of our uFL to SMA adapters.
We added some extra goodies to make this GPS FeatherWing better than a breakout: a FET-driven ENABLE pin so you can turn off the module using any microcontroller pin for low power use, a CR1220 coin cell holder to keep the RTC running and allow warm starts and a tiny bright red LED. The LED blinks at about 1Hz while it’s searching for satellites and blinks once every 15 seconds when a fix is found to conserve power.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: CircuitPython Comes to the ESP32-P4, Emulating Arm on RISC-V, and Much More! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey
