Arduino GPS LCD Clock

Introduction

I built the Arduino GPS Clock by Tony DiCola over at Adafruit.  The clock was very cool, setting it's time from the satellites, however, I soon started feeling like I was wasting my GPS shield by only using it to get time.

So I decided to use the RGB LCD Shield which would allow me to display more information and be more interactive with the device.

Bill of Materials

At the time of this writing I have four boards stacked.  

• 1) The Arduino

• 2) An Adafruit PowerBoost Shield with a 2000ma Lipo Battery

• 3) The Adafruit Ultimate GPS Logger Shield

• 4) The Adafruit RGB LCD Shield.

Step 1

Having four boards stacked does make it bulky but I will be reducing that by dropping the Arduino Uno R3 board and replacing it's functionality with an Arduino Pro Mini placed in the prototype section of the GPS Logger Shield.

On the software side I currently have it displaying the time and date on its initial screen.  Other screens show "Latitude and Longitude", "Speed and Angle", Altitude and Satellites, then the Select button displays the message "This is a clock NOT a bomb.

Step 2

I plan to add some code to support logging GPS coordinates to the SD card. Then I would like to try and implement Ladyada's logger which is interrupt driven to log data.  I would hope to accomplish a feature where background logging could be turned on and off.  The user in the foreground could set flags that would mark spots as important for the back ground logger to flag so that it could be recognized later when importing the data to google maps or some other GPS mapping system.

Here is the current code on codebender. Lots to learn and try on this project.

UPDATE 4/10/16

The Arduino Pro Mini was put in place eliminating the need of the UNO R3.