Nathan and Andrew went to the PSBA after the meeting and brought up the GPS carrier board. Some notes:
- The whole "disable the 3.3V supply when not enumerated" thing is a bit wonky, and needs to be investigated. It's true that it's off, but there was 20 mA of leakage current into the GPS. Oh, wait, see the next issue: this may have been fixed by the problem below - needs to be re-tested which we forgot to do last night.
- The RX/TX lines between the GPS/FTDI chip are mixed. @$@@!!! We can't believe we missed this.
- We need custom stand offs for the GPS receiver. We'll ask Chris or Dave to mfg those for us, since we're machining wimps.
After fixing the RX/TX lines, We attached an active test antenna (Andrew's Sarentel helix) and and walked outside to test it.
- It works! The FTDI FT232R shows up as /dev/ttyUSB and/or COM and the GPS "PocketMax" software talked to the receiver and showed us satellite and lock status.
- Neither of us were impressed with the SNR of the satellites - are we getting interference from the SPS? This needs to be investigated.
- We did get full lock, including WAAS.
- It re-locked a few seconds after a power cycle.
time to mount it!