Introduction: Connecting the Itead Gps Shield to a Raspberry Pi 2

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About: Electrical and Software Engineer

Hi, in this instructable I´m going to talk about connecting the Iteads Raspberry Pi GPS add on V 1.0 with a raspberry pi 2 using raspbian jessie and GPSD.

You can find the shield I used here.

Parts you need:

  • A raspberry pi 2
  • A SD card with raspbian jessie (my OS is from 23 November 2016, but this should work with other jessie distros)
  • A NEO-6M gps micro with Serial communication.
  • Internet access

Step 1: Step 1 : Setting Everything Up

The first thing you´ll need to do is open the serial port in the raspberry pi, for that you need to access the raspbian configuration menu. You can get there using the command sudo raspi-config and under Advanced Options chose A8 Serial in order to enable Serial connections.

The problem with these is that when booting, the raspberry will send unwanted data trough the port. to get around that you need to delete some stuff in cmdline.txt.

For that you should first take a backup using sudo cp /boot/cmdline.txt ~/cmdline.txt.bak

After, using sudo nano cmdline.txt , delete console=Serial0,115200 and kgdboc=Serial0,115200

To end this step, reboot the pi using sudo reboot

Step 2: Step 2: Installing Gpsd and Connecting the Add-on to the Pi

To install the gpsd service and clients to access the data use sudo apt-get install gpsd gpsd-clients

After the installation the file gpsd found in /etc/default must be corrected. In order to do this use the command sudo nano /etc/default/gpsd .

START_DAEMON must be true

USBAUTO must be false

DEVICES must be /dev/ttyAMA0

GPSD_OPTIONS must be "" (nothing

and GPSD_SOCKET must be /var/run/gpsd.sock

reboot again, if any of this instructions are missing in the file just add them.

Step 3: Step 3: Running Gpsd and the Client Cgps

Now you´re able to start the gpsd service using sudo service gpsd start

After powering the shield for the first time, give it 15/30 minutes in the open sky in order to triangulate the position.

Using cgps -s you should get a table just like the one in the picture

Best regards.

Carlos