Now this may seem kind of stupid, but I have to ask. I'm trying to hook up this "skycaddie" sg3 that I don't use to an arduino. It's based off a magellan explorist, so it has a USB and internal serial connection. at first I couldn't get the internal serial to work, and then I accidentally ran my iron way too hot and butchered the solder pads. Now only the USB communication works. Unless I can find a direct serial output from the GPS chip (there are a lot of solder pads, so It's doubtful) I'm stuck with USB. Now, with the arduino, can I connect the USB out of the GPS to the USB in of the FTDI and expect it to work?
Basically,
GPS Serial TX--->GPS USB TX--->arduino USB RX--->arduino serial RX
GPS Serial RX<---GPS USB RX<---arduino USB TX<---arduino serial TX
or will something about the mechanics of USB mess up this setup?
Thanks!
Almost definitely no.
USB is not 'peer to peer' it is 'master slave'
An Arduino is a 'slave' (device) and needs a 'master' (host) to talk to it.
I suspect that your GPS is also a 'slave' (device) so it needs to have a host somewhere too.
Even if the GPS is capable of being a host, there is the further issue of what the Arduino looks like.
An Arduino is not a generic serial device. It needs the host to understand the FTDI interface (the chip used for Arduino's USB to serial).
The host may either have the FTDI drivers in the kernel (as some Linux kernels do), or it can install them (as Windows, Mac's and some Linux and xBSD do).
HTH
GB
got it. I doubted it would be as simple as a serial connection.... Looks like I'll have to find the gps serial output pad (provided it even exists :
)Oh well. Thanks for answering.
Is their a part number on the chip that Mr Google can find?
You might be lucky and find a datasheet.
I seriously doubt it. I think it's an obscure custom GPS device, although if I'm lucky it will just be an explorist 210 or something with a custom firmware, and maybe I'll be able to find a schematic.