This shows a quick and dirty wireless GPS I made from a Copernicus GPS and XBee Pro. I use it because my office doesn't get a good GPS signal, so I can set this little gizmo up on the south side where the GPS signal is good and spit the NMEA strings to my office. I catch them with another XBee that pipes them into my microcontroller....it's none the wiser.



On a fresh set of alkaline AA's, this will run non-stop at the normal 1Hz rate of the GPS for about 2.5 hrs. I was just curious how long this would last from a mobile perspective. Each chip above (the GPS and XBee) takes roughly 50 mA. When you add this whole thing to an AVR MT 128, you get another 50mA or so, and the whole package takes about 150mA.

I recently bought some Nickel Metal Hydride AA's that I'll test out to see what their endurance is. Will post those results once I do the test.

This little fella has been useful enough to me that I'll probably take it off the breadboard and wirewrap it on some protoboard. Maybe someday I'll use this basic design to try my hand at designing a printed circuit board for it. I haven't ever done a PCB before, but want to try it.