TinyGPS 13 has been released. This latest revision improves the algorithm used to transform the raw NMEA latitude and longitude values into floating-point numbers representing decimal degrees. You may not have noticed any problem, but prior versions of TinyGPS generated values that were accurate to only about 5 decimal digits, or about 1 meter. Version [...]
June 13, 2013
We’ve been having lots of fun over the last few weeks playing with a revolutionary new satellite communications device by Rock 7 called the RockBLOCK. I say “revolutionary”, because when you hook it up to an Arduino–and this is super easy–you can inexpensively send and receive short “burst” messages for the first time from anywhere [...]
January 5, 2011
The new year brings another version of the NewSoftSerial library, a beta version 11. Changes since version 10 include: Inheritance from the new Arduino Stream class and commensurate interface adjustments (added peek(), changed signature for available()) write() member is now public, following the lead of Print base class support for Arduino Mega and Mega 2560 [...]
January 7, 2010
NewSoftSerial 10 is available for testing. There are a number of fun new features to play with, including support for 20MHz processors and Arduino siblings like the Teensy and Teensy++. I’ve also added a destructor (and an end()) so that you can employ temporary NewSoftSerial objects, for example: if (need_to_check_GPS) { NewSoftSerial gpsconn(6, 3); ... [...]
May 21, 2009
NewSoftSerial 9 is now available. This is a major new release that replaces all the performance path pin reads and writes with direct Port I/O. What does that give you? Well, a couple of things. Most importantly, it makes NewSoftSerial more compatible with the latest Arduino release. Changes to timings of digitalRead and digitalWrite in [...]
May 2, 2009
Changes in the timing of digitalRead and digitalWrite on 0015 have degraded NewSoftSerial’s and AFSoftSerial’s performance on this platform. If you need software serial at higher baud rates, I recommend you stick with 0014 — at least until NewSoftSerial 9 comes out. The good news is that version 9 has been optimized heavily and it [...]
April 23, 2009
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve spent a fair number of hours in front of the logic analyzer, and the result is NewSoftSerial version 8. The major delta in this release is support for 8MHz processors. The half-speed clock makes accurate serial reception considerably more difficult, but NewSoftSerial 8 still manages to transmit with [...]
April 17, 2009
Thanks to Paul V. and Ben Combee for their useful suggestions on how to support line endings (C++ “endl”) and internal format manipulators, respectively, we now have a bona fide Streaming library. With it, you can now write code like this: Serial << "A is " << lettera << "." << endl; lcd << "The [...]
March 24, 2009
I wrote a new library, Flash, which abstracts away most of the complexity of PROGMEM programming. It provides String, Array, and Table types that make ROM-based data collections as easy to use as “normal” types. Each overrides the C++ [] operator, so to get at individual elements, one simply uses familiar array syntax. For example, [...]
March 3, 2009
Thanks to a helpful suggestion by user DanP, I have increased the effective resolution of the latitude and longitude values returned in TinyGPS. The get_position method now returns values in units of 10-5 degrees, a 10-fold increase in resolution. Note that if you use use the old get_position, you will have to make some minor [...]
The evolution of the Reverse Geocache™
September 1, 2013
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