We love hand-held GPS units. It was a valued Christmas gift many years ago, with its monochrome display and 5-way joystick, but you couldn’t but feel the poor unit was trying to do more than its tiny brain could handle (“C’mon… update the map!”). The Coobro Geo fulfills a nice design niche of what most people want to do: Find their way from here to there! Plus, you build it yourself!

Once built, you connect it to your PC and upload the coordinates you want to navigate to (up to 32 locations, recently upgraded from 5). Turn on the unit, and it points you in the right direction, and shows the relative distance to go – simple!

OR, use it in “breadcrumb” mode. Turn it on, and as you travel, mark “breadcrumb” points (up to 32). When you’re ready to return, the Coobro Geo will lead you back the way you came.

Features:

• High quality Fastrax UP501 GPS module with 66-channel receiver
• All through hole kit is easy to solder and requires minimal tools
• Completely open source hardware and software
• Program the software using the Arduino IDE
• Stores breadcrumbs in EEPROM so it remembers locations when turned off

Kit Includes:

• 1x Fastrax UP501 GPS Module
• 1x Atmega328 DIP Processor
• 1x Coobro Geo PCB
• 14x Bright Blue LEDs
• 2x 10 Ohm Resistor Networks
• 4x .1uF Ceramic Capacitors
• 1x 10uF Electrolytic Capacitor
• 2x Slide Switches
• 1x Push button
• 3x Header pins
• 1x Atmega328 Socket
• 1x 8MHz Ceramic Oscillator
• 1x AAA Enclosed Batter Holder
• 1x Lanyard
• 1x Power Supply Jumper

Notice: in order for this kit to work, you need to have an FTDI cable or an FTDI breakout board.

Open Source Hardware: This kit is 100% open source hardware. Want to hack it into a new project? Full design files and source code are available!

More information (for building, usage, downloads, and support) can be found on the official CoolBro Labs page.