SHoCK2xTc
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college projects on gps
Hello, my name is Brian Warner and I am an Electrical Engineering student. I am working on a group project that concludes in 4-5 months. My group is working on a PDA with GPS car locator. After a long day of classes/work you may have forgotten where you parked your car. I know this post is long so I appreciate your attention and replies/responses. Please let me know if you have any concerns/interest with what we are TRYING to accomplish.
Right now our project is somewhat crude and is designed to provide a distance and direction to our parked car. We have a RF transmitter hooked up to our car's ignition cables thru some relays and we will tell our PDA when our car is turned on or off (using some code which WILL BE written in C), thus marking the car's GPS position when we turn off the engine and walk to class/work.
To make the project much more robust we wanted to get turn by turn directions to our car using the software that comes pre-installed on PDAs that have built in GPS capabilities. This leads to my questions...
1) Is there any software available that allows you to create your own custom map/scenario? For example: our school's campus.
I have not yet purchased any PDA with GPS but I did contact Garmin and they said their software is not programmable.
2) Is there a way to write a program from scratch and run it on the PDA to interface the GPS? (taking into account that my group only has 5 more months to work on this and none of us are very proficient at programming)
One crude method my group was considering to address question 2 is to create a program where every building/parking lot on our campus is represented by a node. We would then have to run some type of software loop that finds the closest/nearest node and then output to the user which way to go to get to the next node. The PDA has to recognize when it is at a node (interaction with the GPS will be necessary here). We were thinking about making each entrance to a building and each "corner of the building's primary boundary" a node just to get a little bit more accurate. This method requires MASSIVE amounts of time in order to create the nodes, measure the distance between them, store the data, then write the loop which processes the data, but we are willing to work hard these last 5 months if this approach is even possible. If there is a better way of doing this PLEASE ADVISE.
(PLEASE input your comments here PLEASE!!)
3) Does anyone have any suggestions how we can approach the issue of parking garages and the issue of Height/Depth? This may be something that we avoid altogether and put in our "if we had more time" section.
I invite responses both critical and helpful. I am a student and I am learning, your feedback is appreciated. I will check back to this post daily for the next few months but I can also be reached at brianiw@hotmail.com
Hello, my name is Brian Warner and I am an Electrical Engineering student. I am working on a group project that concludes in 4-5 months. My group is working on a PDA with GPS car locator. After a long day of classes/work you may have forgotten where you parked your car. I know this post is long so I appreciate your attention and replies/responses. Please let me know if you have any concerns/interest with what we are TRYING to accomplish.
Right now our project is somewhat crude and is designed to provide a distance and direction to our parked car. We have a RF transmitter hooked up to our car's ignition cables thru some relays and we will tell our PDA when our car is turned on or off (using some code which WILL BE written in C), thus marking the car's GPS position when we turn off the engine and walk to class/work.
To make the project much more robust we wanted to get turn by turn directions to our car using the software that comes pre-installed on PDAs that have built in GPS capabilities. This leads to my questions...
1) Is there any software available that allows you to create your own custom map/scenario? For example: our school's campus.
I have not yet purchased any PDA with GPS but I did contact Garmin and they said their software is not programmable.
2) Is there a way to write a program from scratch and run it on the PDA to interface the GPS? (taking into account that my group only has 5 more months to work on this and none of us are very proficient at programming)
One crude method my group was considering to address question 2 is to create a program where every building/parking lot on our campus is represented by a node. We would then have to run some type of software loop that finds the closest/nearest node and then output to the user which way to go to get to the next node. The PDA has to recognize when it is at a node (interaction with the GPS will be necessary here). We were thinking about making each entrance to a building and each "corner of the building's primary boundary" a node just to get a little bit more accurate. This method requires MASSIVE amounts of time in order to create the nodes, measure the distance between them, store the data, then write the loop which processes the data, but we are willing to work hard these last 5 months if this approach is even possible. If there is a better way of doing this PLEASE ADVISE.
(PLEASE input your comments here PLEASE!!)
3) Does anyone have any suggestions how we can approach the issue of parking garages and the issue of Height/Depth? This may be something that we avoid altogether and put in our "if we had more time" section.
I invite responses both critical and helpful. I am a student and I am learning, your feedback is appreciated. I will check back to this post daily for the next few months but I can also be reached at brianiw@hotmail.com
