Project MAM - alpha client hardware

I finally received my SparkFun GPS shield for Arduino so I can go on building my first Project MAM client! MAM is an acronym for Mappatura Automatica Mercatini which means automatic flea-market mapping in Italian.

Why would someone want to do this? I want to keep track of the size flea markets I visit and draw maps to show how and where the benches are placed. Doing this manually gets boring VERY fast, so a bit of automation is needed.

The general idea is to log my walk through the flea market and then use the information to draw a map automagically :-) . The drawing software (using maps from Google or OpenStreetMap) is going to be a subject for another post, now I want to talk about the client hardware part: the device I'm going to use consists of

• An Arduino box
• An Arduino UNO board
• A SparkFun GPS-10710 shield
• An EM-406A GPS module
• 3x 4k7 ohm resistors
• 3x 10k ohm resistors
• A MicroSD to SD adapter (SD is used to log GPS data)
• Some breadboard pin male and female strips

Mounting the GPS shield and module is very easy: everything is already prepared and you need to just plug the module in and fix it with a small strip of bi-adhesive tape (make sure it's small, or You could have problems removing the module in future!) . Now I could have just used an SD-adapter shield but then the board would have been impossible to fit inside my box so I decided to use the proto-zone on the GPS shield to build the SD reader myself. It's actually pretty simple: You just need 6 resistors to drop the voltage and some wire. I took the idea from HERE.

SD connection scheme

This way everything fits neatly inside the box. The SD adapter is converted into a removable card holder, just in case I need the space for something else.

As the SparkFun shield is missing a hole, the box requires a plastic holder to be cut to insert both boards properly:

The modded box

I'll publish the Arduino sketch soon (I need to do some test-runs and right now I'm blocked at home because of the snow) and the main software sources will be published too when ready for public consumption! Stay tuned!

The contraption is ready to do its job!