Alexander Gloger

High Altitude Ballooning

March 22, 2017
Arduino Uno - Adafruit Ultimate GPS Breakout
Roscoe Village Peterson Park Commute

Background
A Geographic Positioning System (GPS) is an electronic device that pinpoints a users
location on Earth by communicating with satellites orbiting the planet in space. By
relaying the distance from one satellites position over the earth and comparing it to
another nearby, a GPS can calculate exactly where someone is on Earth per Garmin.
Furthermore, Adafruit Industries, LLC. manufactures the Ultimate GPS Breakout, a GPS
unit that is compatible for use with the Arduino Uno microcontroller. The project that
utilized these two devices consisted of tracking the location pinpoints recorded by the
GPS unit to determine the travel time from Roscoe Village to Peterson Park in Chicago.

After acquiring data readings from the GPS unit, the distance was organized in time
windows (for convenience) to determine the travel time between certain distances to
find an overall travel time for the entire trip. Before finding this travel time, the data
must be comprehended. A single NMEA sentence of data relayed by the GPS unit looks
like this:

$PGTOP,11,3*6F
$GPGGA,233548.000,4156.6604,N,08740.4381,W,2,08,1.07,196.9,M,-34.0,M,0000,0000*52
$GPRMC,233548.000,A,4156.6604,N,08740.4381,W,0.02,33.15,200317,,,D*44

but what does any of it mean?

Each section of data created by the GPS unit relays different information but were only
concerned with the third lines for this project since it contains most of the useful (for us)
data.

$GPRMC,233548.000,A,4156.6604,N,08740.4381,W,0.02,33.15,200317,,,D*44

The RMC (Recommended Minimum), per Adafruit, contains the time in GMT/Zulu for
the hour in the first two numbers, followed by the minutes in the next two, then
seconds with the next two and finally milliseconds after the decimal. The GPS does not
convert the time for Chicago automatically, it was about 11:35PM in London.
Furthermore, since the time difference from London to Chicago is 5 hours ahead, 11 5
= 6. So the time that this one line of data was taken was around 6:35PM Chicago time,
which makes sense because thats around the time that the recording the data
commenced.
After the time is a letter A which literally means Active: Your GPS is synced with
the satellites and you can trust whatever data you receive from it is accurate.

Next the location data. The first number is the Latitude followed by the decimal
minutes north. In our instance, 41 is the Latitude followed by 56.6604 Minutes North.
After that is your longitude with the same conditions, (ignore the first zero/use only 4
numbers to the left of the decimal!) 87 Degrees and 40.4381 minutes West. This data
makes sense considering that Chicago is in the North-Western Quadrant of the worlds
gridding system.

Keeping this in mind, if we take this data to find where we were on Google Maps, we
would have to input: +41 56.6604 , -87 40.4381 (East of the Prime Meridian is negative)
to find out location on Google Maps.

The numbers after the longitude data is the speed in knots (which in our case was very
slow clocking in at 0.02kn).

Next to that is the compass angle from which we are headed. Since this is the very first
line in the recorded data, it has no other position to compare data to so pay no attention
to it for now.

After that is the date

that the data was
recorded: March 20,
2017.

The final line is XX

data, which just
verifies your data is
being logged.

Having second
thoughts about using
the GPS data after all
that? I sure am after
having to research it!

Objective
By using an Ultimate
GPS Breakout by
Adafruit, we are able
to determine the
commute time from
Roscoe Village (the adjacent neighborhood to Lane Tech) to Peterson park (around
Mather High School). The Main roads taken from the start point of data to our
destination were Roscoe St., Western Ave., Lawrence Ave., and California Ave. as
shown in the provided map.

Data
The data for the whole length of the journey comes out to be 26 pages long. This is
because when I tried setting the delay to 60,000 micro seconds to make things easier and
only interpret like 20 points of data, Arduino wouldnt let me. Instead, it delayed the
data by 1,000 milliseconds so I was set to record data at every second during the
journey instead of every minute. Thanks Arduino.

Luckily, I know how to remedy the situation: I copied the data onto a word document,
then searched for every term that begun with the $PGTOP sentence and discovered that
there were 16 lines per page for 25 pages. Conveniently, 16 lines * 25 pages comes out to
around 400 seconds of data assuming there are no errors or technical issues.

To make things easier for you, I have condensed the data for you to interpret in sections
by extracting it from every 50 lines which took very long. Youre welcome.

UMT/Zulu (Line of Data) Latitude Longitude Speed (knots

Time (Degrees (Degrees [kn])
(Hr:Min:Sec) Minutes) Minutes)
23 : 35 : 48 0/1 41 56.5504 N -87 40.4381 W 0.02 kn
23 : 36 : 37 50 41 56.6059 N -87 40.4342 W 0.14 kn
23 : 37 : 27 100 41 56.5972 N -87 40.5783 W 270.72 kn
23 : 38 : 17 150 41 56.5947 N -87 40.6999 W 10.59 kn
23 : 39 : 07 200 41 56.5923 N -87 40.9165 W 8.65 kn
23 : 39 : 43 250 41 56.5890 N -87 41.1304 W 11.78 kn
23 : 44 : 01 300 41 57.2215 N -87 41.3071 W 13.65 kn
23 : 44 : 51 350 41 57.4288 N -87 41.3116 W 0.00 kn
23 : 45 : 41 400 41 57.6590 N -87 41.3194 W 13.14 kn

Since were not all pilots or ship navigators, we would have to convert the distances
given in coordinates (degrees + minutes) into something more concrete like miles. To do
this, we must do some conversion.

First, we must understand that 1 (degree) = 60 (minutes). Using this conversion factor
to do our calculations, we must convert everything to degrees and not have any left
over minutes or seconds! We take, for example, our distance in minutes for the first line
of data for latitude (56.5504) and multiply it by our conversion factor accordingly:
 1
65.5504 ( ) = 0.9425066667 or 0.94 (sig figs). We now add that to our given degrees
60
for the first Line of Data to get 41.94.

Now youll do the same for the second line of data and subtract the first line of data
from the second to get the change in distance in terms of degrees of the two data points.
Youll have the distance given in degrees, and will have to multiply it by 111.325 to
receive the distance traveled in between the two points given in kilometers. The
111.535
conversion factor for 1 = 111.352km or .
1

Conclusion
Now youre probably noticing a bunch of problems with the data displayed on the table
such as if there were 400 seconds in the trip (one line of data for every second), why is
there a change in Zulu time of a little short of 10 minutes? Moreover, why does the
Latitude and longitude experiencing shifts in nominal values?

If this GPS machine was perfect, it would have data for 10 minutes or around 600
seconds, why do we only have 400 lines (which is like 6.67 minutes) of data? Were
short by 200 seconds!

Now theres exactly 400 lines of data, I promise you (and if you dont believe me, youre
more than welcome to count all 400 sentences to check), but why is our GMT off? If
youll notice the first two lines, it starts at 48 seconds but then goes to 37 seconds, off by
one. Later on, there are differences of quantities not 50 seconds further down the chart.

These errors can be explained with the concept that nothing is perfect in science or
technology. If it were perfect, it would have reported 600 lines of data for our 10 minute
trip. Furthermore, we can conclude that there were breaks of communication between
the GPS unit and the nearby satellites.

Reasons for such interruptions might include the fact that this experiment was
conducted in a city with many communications devices (mobile phones, transmission
towers mounted on homes and buildings, police radios, ect.) transmitting signals and
data that might have interfered with the Ultimate GPS breakout. Additionally, the GPS
unit is intended (at least for this class) to be mounted on a weather balloon where little
interference from nearby communications devices is likely to occur.

Perhaps youre wondering why I didnt calculate the changes of distance to find the
time. Thats because the data is inconsistent due to the instrumentational errors
experienced with the GPS unit for whatever reasons. It would be useless as well as
inaccurate to calculate distances and try to relate them to time if the time was not
constant throughout the entire experiment.
Also, the thing to keep in mind is that this GPS unit needs to communicate with
satellites in space to pinpoint data. Now, not every satellite orbits the Earth at the same
speed; take the ISS for example, which orbits the Earth at around 17,150 miles an hour.
Many satellites like the ISS travel at similar speeds and could potentially break if they
go out of range of the GPS, it would take some time before another one comes around to
communicate with the unit. This explains the gaps in time. Perhaps I would have more
consistent results if I was conducting the experiment in a rural setting without so much
interference for a rather non-industrial grade instrument.

Future Work
Adafruit Ultimate GPS Breakout is a wonderful device to use with Arduino. If you plan
on using it to store and log data from a project like a High Altitude Ballooning launch
and you need exact precise numeric data, I would highly recommend it. However, if
youre going to try to find your commute time with it like I did, you might as well
purchase a Garmin or a device compatible with Google Maps, both have traffic,
weather, and highly-sophisticated software with preloaded algorithms to predict
commuting times more accurately!
Works Cited

I. Truong, Angela Truong Thuy. Vocal Cord Dysfunction:An Updated

Review. Otolaryngology, vol. 02, no. 01, 20 Feb. 2017, doi:10.4172/2161-
119x.s1-002. Accessed 22 Mar. 2017.
II. Baddeley, Glenn. GPS - NMEA Sentence Information. GPS - NMEA
Sentence Information, Glenn Baddeley, 2001, aprs.gids.nl/nmea/#gga.
Accessed 22 Mar. 2017.
III. RMC - Recommended Minimum Specific GPS/Transit Data. RMC -
Recommended Minimum Specific GPS/Transit Data (NMEA-0183), University of
Texas, Austin,
www.ae.utexas.edu/courses/ase389p7/projects/svatek/commands/RMC.ht
ml. Accessed 22 Mar. 2017.
IV. GPS, UTC, and TAI Clocks. GPS, UTC, and TAI Clocks, Leapsecond.com, 7
Jan. 2001, www.leapsecond.com/java/gpsclock.htm. Accessed 22 Mar. 2017.
V. Lee, Desmond. What Is GPS? Garmin | What Is GPS?, Garmin, Ltd.,
www8.garmin.com/aboutGPS/. Accessed 22 Mar. 2017.
VI. Ask an Astronomer. Cool Cosmos, California Institute of Technology's
Infrared Processing and Analysis Center,
coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/ask/282-How-fast-does-the-Space-Station-
travel-. Accessed 23 Mar. 2017.