Thursday, January 17, 2013

U-blox PCI-5S - a cheap GPS module for your projects


 [Update] I have found the timepulse output!

The U-blox PCI-5S is the cheapest GPS module on eBay right now (although you have to buy an additional antenna).
At first glance it seems useless for microcontroller projects because it's a mini PCIe card, but as it turns out it has an easily accessible UART port that can be connected to a microcontroller.

Here's the pinout:
The USB device is a standard CDC ACM serial port.

RX/TX pins are a second (independent of USB) UART port running at 9600bps by default.

You can use u-center to modify the module's configuration, for example set the update frequency to 4Hz.

Happy hacking!