I've been wanting to try geocacheing for a while. My friend has a GPS I could borrow, but I thought it'd be more fun to make one.
It wouldn't be anything fancy. I'd just like a hand held device with an LCD to display the current GPS location and the cache coordinates, and a circle of maybe 8 LEDs to indicate what direction to travel in order to get to the cache. From what I've seen, it'd basically be a reverse-geocache puzzle without the box opening when the destination is found.
My main question is if I can use what I've already got.
I have an adafruit LCD shield as well as an adafruit ultimate-gps logger shield.
Would it be feasible to use these shields, or would it be easier to get an LCD and GPS module by themselves?
Also, I'd like to eventually have a little user interface program on my computer to easily enter cache coordinates without using the arduino sketch thing. Do you think this would be beyond the abilities of a beginner? (I've done some arduino projects in the past, but I fear that I've forgotten more than I learned)
I have an adafruit LCD shield as well as an adafruit ultimate-gps logger shield.
Your "links" don't seem to work.
Would it be feasible to use these shields,
Hard to say without seeing them.
Also, I'd like to eventually have a little user interface program on my computer to easily enter cache coordinates without using the arduino sketch thing.
I hope you mean "without needing to edit the Arduino sketch", instead of "without using the arduino sketch thing". Without an Arduino "sketch thing", the Arduino is a paperweight.
Do you think this would be beyond the abilities of a beginner?
Depends on the beginner. The real question is whether you think it is beyond your abilities.
If you understand what a GPS does, and can get data from the GPS, the rest is simple (relatively speaking).
i have been geocaching since 2007 and i always used my mobile phone. Perhaps you should try some "regular geocaching" to find out what features will be important for your device. For Android devices there is c:geo: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cgeo.geocaching&hl=en
Based on my experience the device would feature a compass, a signal strength indicator, storage for at least 20 waypoints (including the location of where you parked your car!) and a calculator for multi-cache puzzles.
For a beginner this is a really big project but you'll learn a lot, i guess
