Adventures in Science: How GPS Works

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a collection of satellites, each containing a powerful and precise atomic clock, that broadcasts their time every 30 seconds. Handheld receivers, like your smartphone, can collect this data and perform calculations to figure out their position on the surface of the Earth.

In this episode, we talk about how GPS works and how you can use a receiver to obtain time, latitude, longitude, and altitude data with an Arduino. From there, your robot project could know its location and how to drive somewhere.

GPS receiver: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13740
Code for raw NMEA data: https://gist.github.com/ShawnHymel/eb...
Code for parsed NMEA data: https://gist.github.com/ShawnHymel/93...