Electron Asset Tracker - GPS - Initial Setup

Tutorials
1

I thought I would try to summaries my trials and success with the Asset Tracker.
Once you have your Electron setup and connected to the internet…

  1. Purchase a Coin Cell Battery for the GPS (CR1220) and insert on the board

  2. Utilize the AssetTrackerRK library, as it has less issues as of Jan24,2017 (in my testing i haven’t found any issues, so ‘less’ could be ‘no’ in my case :smile: )

  3. The first Fix (GPS getting coordinates) can take several hours and it really does need a clear view of the sky in ALL directions. I found it easiest to take it for a drive on the dashboard of my car.

  4. After first fix, and with the coin battery installed, future positions are much quicker.
    NOTE: although future positions are quicker, if the GPS doesn’t have a clear view of the sky, the position can change up to (in my case) 300ft. So if your mapping the points to somewhere like Ubidots, you will see it “jump” around a lot.

  5. loop() MUST be quick… meaning you need to call gpsUpdate() frequently and quickly… several seconds can cause it to stop returning meaningful data (so even though it has a fix, your program will start to fail reading coordinates).
    TODO: likely if you disable (turn off) the gps and bring it back online, this issue can be avoided during long processing or sleeps (have yet to test this theory).

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