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You're reading from  Raspberry Pi Robotic Projects - Third Edition

Product typeBook
Published inOct 2016
Reading LevelBeginner
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ISBN-139781786467966
Edition3rd Edition
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Authors (2):
Richard Grimmett
Richard Grimmett
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Richard Grimmett

Dr. Richard Grimmett has been fascinated by computers and electronics from his very first programming project, which used Fortran on punch cards. He has bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering and a PhD in leadership studies. He also has 26 years of experience in the radar and telecommunications industries, and even has one of the original brick phones. He now teaches computer science and electrical engineering at Brigham Young University, Idaho, where his office is filled with his many robotics projects.
Read more about Richard Grimmett

Jon Witts
Jon Witts
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Jon Witts

Jon Witts has been working within the IT industry since 2002 and specifically within Educational IT since 2004. He was introduced to Linux back in 2001 through his collaboration with two German artists who were visiting the arts organisation he was then working with. Having studied Fine Arts and Educational Technology and sought to innovate with open and accessible digital technologies within his creative practice, Jon is happiest when deconstructing technology and finding its limits. Jon has embedded within his school the use of Raspberry Pi computers, as an integral part of the delivery of the school's Computer Science curriculum as well as to run various school clubs and projects. Jon is a Raspberry Pi Certified Educator and also helps to organise and run the Hull Raspberry Jam events. I would like to thank my wife, Sally and our three daughters for putting up with all the cables and compoents around the house, and not least for being so tolerant of the need to dodge the robots racing round the kitchen floor!
Read more about Jon Witts

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Accessing the USB GPS programmatically


Now that you can access the GPS device, let's work on accessing the data programmatically. Your project should now have the GPS device connected and have access to query the data via the serial port. In this section, you will create a program to use this data to discover where you are, then you can determine what to do with that information.

If you've completed the previous section, you should be able to receive the raw data from the GPS unit. Now you want to be able to do something with this data; for example, find your current location and altitude and then decide whether your target location is to the West, East, North, or South.

First, get the information from the raw data. As noted previously, the position and speed is in the $GPMRC output of the GPS device. Write a program to simply parse out a couple of pieces of information from that data. So, open a new file (you can name it location.py) and edit it, as shown in the following screenshot:

#!/usr...
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Raspberry Pi Robotic Projects - Third Edition
Published in: Oct 2016Publisher: ISBN-13: 9781786467966

Authors (2)

author image
Richard Grimmett

Dr. Richard Grimmett has been fascinated by computers and electronics from his very first programming project, which used Fortran on punch cards. He has bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering and a PhD in leadership studies. He also has 26 years of experience in the radar and telecommunications industries, and even has one of the original brick phones. He now teaches computer science and electrical engineering at Brigham Young University, Idaho, where his office is filled with his many robotics projects.
Read more about Richard Grimmett

author image
Jon Witts

Jon Witts has been working within the IT industry since 2002 and specifically within Educational IT since 2004. He was introduced to Linux back in 2001 through his collaboration with two German artists who were visiting the arts organisation he was then working with. Having studied Fine Arts and Educational Technology and sought to innovate with open and accessible digital technologies within his creative practice, Jon is happiest when deconstructing technology and finding its limits. Jon has embedded within his school the use of Raspberry Pi computers, as an integral part of the delivery of the school's Computer Science curriculum as well as to run various school clubs and projects. Jon is a Raspberry Pi Certified Educator and also helps to organise and run the Hull Raspberry Jam events. I would like to thank my wife, Sally and our three daughters for putting up with all the cables and compoents around the house, and not least for being so tolerant of the need to dodge the robots racing round the kitchen floor!
Read more about Jon Witts