I added two photographs to the gallery which show the portion of my workbench where I am working on the hardware for this project. The second picture with just two small boxes in it show the GPS receiver package. The square object near the top right of the picture is the heart of the GPS receiver package with its NEO-6M module in the center of the PCB. Towards the bottom left is the antenna with the black cable attached which connects it to the PCB.

The first picture is the main shows a solderless breadboard that has items on it for three different projects I have in progress. The parts relevant to this project start are the Raspberry Pi (at the top of the picture) with the black cable coming from it to a T-cobbler breakout board. Below the T-cobbler is a 74LVC245 IC which is used as a buffer between the 3.3 volt signals of the Pi and the 5V signals on the breadboard. The large IC below the buffer chip is an ATmega644 AVR microprocessor from Atmel. The blue device at the top of the picture, to the right of the Raspberry Pi, is a vacuum florescent display (VFD).

The Raspberry Pi is the software development platform for this project. I installed a GCC based cross-compiler toolchain on it that allows me to write and compile software to be run on the AVR microcontroller. I use avrdude to program the AVR microcontroller using the SPI interface of the Raspberry Pi. The VFD is serial based so it will act as the camera during early testing. I will use it to display GPS data allowing me to verify that the AVR is receiving and decoding the GPS messages from the NEO-6M.

The other items on the breaboard, not relevant to this project, are a capacitor ESR meter (down the left side) and a graphical LCD module (seen on the right side of the picture and connected to the AVR microcontroller via a multi-coloured ribbon cable).