Fritzing

This project is a distance and bearing calculator based on geographical coordinates obtained from a GPS receiver. It has an Arduino 2560 Mega as a processor and a LCD for data display.

This work has applications in robotics, geocaching and localization. If you intend to send a robotic vehicle (car, plane or boat) in a predetermined path you must consider a series of coordinate points ( waypoints) along the trajectory it must develop. The coordinate points(latitude, longitude) can be obtained from Google maps or Google Earth easily and can be inserted in a array as in the code which goes with the sketch.

The main components are an GPS receiver, a LCD display and an Arduino Mega 2560. The processor does the calculations for distance between waypoints and bearing, and as soon the device approaches a waypoint, moves to next, and so on, doing the calculations needed to complete the journey. The potentiometer is for changing the display contrast in order to see the characters correctly. The GPS receiver is a EM 406, quite old in fact, but does the job well and uses a hardware serial port of the MEGA.