GPS and getting my location

Finally, something useful!

I have a pwangotchi, and that works well. I wanted to add GPS, got the hardware and gave up when there was the slightest bit of difficulty (wouldn’t render right, and nuked the battery).

I’ve found the GPS USB stick, a U-Blox7 GPS/GLONASS after a recent tidy of my car, and wanted to see what I can do with it.

Looking for drivers, the consensus online is ‘Windows will do it’s thing, and it’ll just work’… No, that’s not true, it just shows up as a COM device, not useful. Windows ‘get drivers’ also produced no resulsts.

Hunt for drivers

Checking online, the vendor, u-Blox (they seem to have left the consumer market) basically said GFYS, the drivers are gone, Windows will do Windows and get the drivers.

Their site has a forum which points to this page (now 404’s), like all good things on the internet…

I was annoyed, and though spite, used Wayback Machine to find the drivers! I’ve installed these, and now it seems to display correctly in device manager.

The file is attached here, if the archive link ever stops working.

Now, how can I use the device for something fun? Not sure.

First thing I tried was GPS Utlity, but I can’t see the device in the supported list?

Next was finding this page, which recommends to use U-center App, which is from u-blox, and still seems to be in support!

And would you look at that! After selecting the correct device (Receiver > Connection > Sensor API > Select the device listed), I’ve got things!

This is pre-fix (so I don’t DOX myself, and getting the fix seems to be slow), but it’s working - I can see sats, it’s got the time, and other things: I’ve had a successful fix, so it does work.

Edit:

Here’s u-center [sic] with a successful lock. Boxes in the top right are telling me I’ve got a number of sats in lock, providing 3D triangulation. Below that a little is where they are in the sky (I think if I look stright up is the centre?), my speed (I’m at a desk, so this is just drift), my altitude, and a few other bits of information that is mostly novelty at this point.

Anyways, this was about where I wanted to get. I’d like to setup a GPS time server for my home network, further research required.

Thanks for reading!