Asset Tracker - Monitoring over Serial

Getting Started
1

Hi again. I have managed to get to where I have the Electron/Asset Tracker operating and communicating via the cloud to report GPS data into the Particle dashboard.
!!! :smile:
One thing that I am struggling with is the monitoring of the NMEA sentences over serial.
I have loaded the AssetTracker library and I can see in the 1_GPS_Features code that I should be able to see the raw NMEA sentences from the GPS over the serial.

// Opens up a Serial port so you can listen over USB
    Serial.begin(9600);

and

  // Dumps the full NMEA sentence to serial in case you're curious
        Serial.println(t.preNMEA());

But when I run the serial monitor in Particle Dev (whilst Electron is running the Asset Tracker code and breathing cyan) - there is no serial data stream.
I even monitored with PuTTy, same result.

As usual I probably have missed something. Can you help me with what it is?

Thanks (thanks to all those who offer advice!! :beers: :clap: )

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Have you been able to see any other Serial.print() output?

3

Hi @ScruffR. Thanks for that good question. It lead me to try a very basic program to serial print “Hello World” and it worked fine. Visible in serial monitor in Particle Dev. Great. Went back to the Asset Tracker code and saw that the serial print code i quoted in earlier post is inside an If statement, with the conditions not being met.
So the problem (as usual) was with “the nut on the end of the steering wheel” or as the old time electrical engineers would say “the short (circuit) between the ears”.
I cutdown the Asset Tracker code to simply get a continuous stream of serial prints of the NMEA sentences, compiled, flashed and lo and behold… there in the serial monitor were beautiful NMEA sentences coming thick and fast…
:grinning:
Another minor step forward.
So thanks @ScruffR you helped me again.
Hopefully you dont get tired of dumb questions… at least for a little while… :beers:

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