I wanted to make a GPS project which would have a GLCD display and GPS and show you your location and the location of a known position on a display and track you as you would approach the position.
The map can be very crude. The center would be your location and a dot would be the desired destination on a flat blank 2D image. You would put the destination latitude and longitude in by keyboard or select from saved locations.
My main questions would be
Is it possible for hobbyist to make with the parts available online, without being super expensive?
Which IC/board can I use? Arduino UNO or Beaglebone, something else?
What would the difficulty be?
Extra stuff (optional)
As it tracks your position could it actually show the terrain map of where you're standing.? Like hills mountain, rivers. Or literally a image from google maps of the current position.
Can a line be drawn from the GPS to the destination on the map?
Have a pulse emanate from the center like a sonar effect on the map as the gps updates the info
You might be able to squeeze that onto an Arduino but it would be much more crude than what could be done with a smart phone application or laptop. Or by just buying a GPS unit with a graphical display that has the features you need.
I know that whatever can be made from hobbyist parts will be much cruder and bigger than what's being made in the industry. The purpose is that I want to be able to make it myself. I already have a GPS unit in my car I could use for GSP. I want to know if I can put GPS (the way I want GPS) in my "toolbox" of hobbyist home projects.
It can be done with an arduino, though as already noted, it would be fairly crude. If you used one with an SD card, you might be able to make the LCD 2D images a bit more interesting. Take a look at Sparkfun or the like to price out a GPS receiver, LCD and keyboard.
It's probably a medium difficulty project - talking to a keyboard and GPS is well known and you'll find plenty of examples. Drawing graphics to represent terrain and rhumb lines pixel by pixel on a display is something that'll be rather more custom to your application.
What you want to do seems like NAVIN’s miniHomer or Bushnell’s BackTrack.
Having a reference point from previous set GPS location or an entered location, and it gives out heading & distance from your current location to that reference point.
How to get map to displayed is more difficult, likely you’ll need internet connection and use GoogleMap, easier to implement without map.
All you need is a GPS receiver and a MEMS magnetometer, easily gotten from SparkFun. MEMS magnetometer is for heading determination when not in motion, as GPS heading is only correct when moving.
Thank you for your reply. Those devices do pretty much all i need. Could the arrow be put on screen with another dot for the destination. I'm asking is the coding/processing possible to crunch that kind of data. If so which IC would be good for that? Also if there are good libraries for people like myself who are can use code and modify it, but not advanced enough to go in depth and create complicated libraries.
If there is anyone who has done a GPS project where it doesn't just log the info but displays it on a screen I would like to hear from you on what you did and what you used. Thanks in advance.
Display on LCD is much more complicated and tedious, method varies with each different display. You might want to look for display that already has some library support for drawing, instead of needing to create your own. Below link is a recent article touching something similar what you wish to do with GPS, for your reference.