Description
Give your Feather a sense of place, with an Ultimate GPS FeatherWing. This FeatherWing plugs right into your Feather board and gives it a precise, sensitive, and low power GPS module for location identification anywhere in the world. As a bonus, the GPS can also keep track of time once it is synced with the satellites.
Works with all Feathers except for those with USB-Serial converters that use the UART pins. Right now that means the Feather 328p, ESP8266 Huzzah Feather and nRF52832 Feather don’t work
The Wing is built around the MTK3333 chipset, a no-nonsense, high-quality GPS+GLONASS module that can track up to 33 satellites on 99 channels, has an excellent high-sensitivity receiver (-165 dB tracking!), and a built-in antenna. It can do up to 10 location updates a second for high speed, high sensitivity logging, or tracking. Power usage is incredibly low, only 30 mA during navigation.
The MTK3333-based module has external antenna functionality. The module has a standard ceramic patch antenna that gives it -165 dB sensitivity, but when you want to have a bigger antenna, you can snap on any 3V active GPS antenna via the uFL connector. The module will automatically detect the active antenna and switch over!
Adafruit also added some extra goodies to make this GPS FeatherWing better than a breakout: a FET-driven ENABLE pin so you can turn off the module using any microcontroller pin for low power use, a CR1220 coin cell holder to keep the RTC running and allow warm starts and a tiny bright red LED. The LED blinks at about 1Hz while it’s searching for satellites and blinks once every 15 seconds when a fix is found to conserve power.
The board ships as a fully assembled FeatherWing with GPS module and a coin cell holder. However, the 12mm coin cell is not included – it isn’t required but if you would like a battery backup, a CR1220 coin battery must be purchased separately.