Inspiration
Free will and pondering
What it does
The Liquor Store Compass uses a Texas Instruments TIVA C Launchpad with a custom FreeRTOS to ingest GPS coordinates and digital compass data, and display the heading of the nearest liquor store.
How we built it
The device consists of a: TIVA C TM4C123G Launchpad, Adafruit Ultimate GPS GNSS board, MLX90393 3-axis magnetometer and accessory microcontrollers and a computer to translate
Challenges we ran into
- Bypassing the FTDI chip on the Ultimate GPS Board so that we could communicate directly through serial
- Figuring out the operation of the GPS board
- Integrating the MLX90393 using the TI DriverLib libraries to read and write registers
- Figuring out the data flow and control flow for both sensors
- Getting include errors when some PATH includes got randomly deleted
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Spinning bottle graphic
- JSON parser that pulled local liquor stores through Google Maps, sorted them by location, and calculated distance and angle between each location.
What we learned
- ALWAYS have multiples of the same board available for design prototyping and integration
- ALWAYS bring a very fine soldering tip, flux, and helping hand
What's next for Liquor Store Compass v0
For v1, we plan on swapping out the Ultimate GPS board for one that natively breaks out the serial communication for a microcontroller, swapping out the active microprocessor, and integrating everything into a single, small PCB with a battery.
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