MSP430 GPS Interface – NMEA et all

[P]ascal from the passworld forums came up with a GPS interface for the Soroban evaluation kit. The Soroban series are general-purpose evaluation kit boards with data logging capability, based on Texas Instrument’s 8Mhz MSP430F169 and MSP430F1611 Microcontrollers.

He used an off the shelf GPS module with a NMEA protocol. Since USART1 was already taken up by the LCD ans RTC, he used USART0 to talk to the GPS. On his implementation of the NMEA protocol, he says:

As for the implementation, first I knew that I would get some NMEA data. When looking at that home page, I understand that NMEA is nothing more than plain text data. The module spec says that I would get 1 set of informations every second. After a few experiments, I found out that the data is about 250 bytes coming in a burst every second. Sometimes there is more, but the most I had was about 400 bytes. So I decided to receive data in a 512 byte buffer.

[P]ascal had to make a few changes to the PCB for the patch antenna and voltage level matching for the GPS module interface to 2V. Good work!

Code is available on his forum thread.