Can I get some help wiring up this GPS unit?

Question

I got a microstack gps as a gift, and I would like to do something with Unfortunately, I do not also have the micro-stack base board. I am looking at the Documentation for the microstack base board hoping that I can just jumper the GPIO pins of the raspberry pi to the pins of the GPS module.

I have a raspbery pi that has a yellow RCA plug video output. what kind of Raspberry pi is that? I cannot figure out where pins GPIO0-GPIO4 are. Or rather, there seems to be multiple conflicting internet resources. I am also uncertain about where MTXSRX and MRXSTX pins are.

Can I get some feed back on hooking this up?

A listing of the pins on the unit would be useful as would some close-up photos. Your second link does not work. The harder you make it to help you the less help you will get. — joan, Aug 01 '15 at 08:07
If you have no ethernet jack, that's a model A, otherwise it's a B. TXD and RXD are clearly labelled here. — goldilocks, Aug 01 '15 at 14:31

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 01 '15 at 17:47

The baseboard you are referring to doesn't just seem to link the GPIOs, it also seems to have a 3V3 voltage regulator, a independent power supply, and likely a lot of resistors and other components on it as well:

^Source

The board connects to the GPIO P1 header on the P1 (the big one in the corner), which has the following Pins:

^{Source: http://elinux.org/RPi_Low-level_peripherals (Google cached version here if site is still down)}

So you could connect the gps unit to the Pi via wiring directly, however without the needed components and a schematic of the board's wiring, this could easily go wrong and fry the gps unit and/or the Pi. Therefore I think it would be easier (and possibly cheaper considering the price and availability of some components needed) to by the baseboard and use that.

N.B. It sounds like the Pi you are using is a original A or B model (you can compare against picture here if you need to), which should work with the baseboard as the site shows it is compatible:

I am getting Something out of it now, on the serial port. I installed and did the configuration via minicom. I need to test it further i think. Here is the data it is spewing out. http://nanocluster.umeche.maine.edu/gps does this look like valid data? — j0h, Aug 03 '15 at 17:33
@j0h lol I suppose the board basically just acts a serial interface... and from the looks the external power supply is optional as well. The output looks to be NMEA encoded, you may be able to get GPSD to interpret the data. — Wilf, Aug 03 '15 at 19:13
I2C is a 1 wire protocol (as I understand it) I am currious, if the microstack base board has any ICs on the opposite side. on the top, i see the voltage regulator. — j0h, Aug 07 '15 at 03:11

Can I get some help wiring up this GPS unit?

1 Answers1