Accessing the GPS programmatically and determining how to move to a location

Now that you can access your GPS device, let's work on accessing the data programmatically.

Prepare for lift off

Your project should now have the GPS connected and have access to querying the data via the serial port. In this section, you will create a program to use this data to discover where you are, and then you can determine what to do with that information.

Engage thrusters

If you completed the last section, you should be able to receive the raw data from the GPS unit. Now you want to be able to take this data and do something with it, for example, find your current location and altitude and then decide if your target location is to the west, east, north, or south.

First, get the information out of the raw data. As noted earlier, our position and speed is in the $GPMRC output of our GPS. First, write a program to simply parse out a couple of pieces of info from that data. So open a new file (you can name it location...