Another DIY GPS logger approach

Two now wired up, so I'm at the start of the firmware install.
First win, found the W7 drivers here.
learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/how-to-install-ch340-drivers/all

That now seems to work with the espessif32 download tool.

Maybe, but it doesn't seem to work with arduino.
Not getting very far at the moment, need a break from it.

Back to linux, one of the problems was old arduino V1.8, both the W7 and Mint 21 use it, but W10 uses V2 which will download the ESP32 stuff. Windows 10 in the Virtual machine is very slow, and keeps shutting itself down after a period of time, maybe because it's a free demo version.
Anyway, I've installed a v2 arduino appimage, it's downloading the ESP32 stuff now, takes longer than the manual says, but I'm getting a lot of versions.
Wish me luck I'm off to bed as soon as it's done

Thanks WA66.
I reached another dead end with linux, so Hardy bought his windows 10 laptop around, that got us few steps further along the path, but after apparently downloading the wifi instructions to the device, it's not connecting to the router.
I'm not sure if it's a data/charging cable issue or a driver issue. Anyway, Joe's taken his laptop home, so we'll wait for assistance, probably from Elmo.
I've got 10 more boards to wire up, that will keep me busy in the meantime, and Hardy's taken the rest of the print outs to clean up.
So it's still all happening.

Fangy says he's having trouble posting pics, so here's my attempt with the board in it's vice

You'll have to bring them around to my place Mike as my l;aptop is a work unit so I did it all from my desktop at home.

I recently finished my 2 units as well. I took them for the first sail yesterday in the final configuration. I just thought I would write up my experience as well.

All bits for the board where bought from Allie express. Everything turned up pretty quick. I did get caught out buying a non branded gps module. Fortunately I found out before it was sealed up with epoxy. Just make sure when searching for the gps search for "Beitian BN220" and not just "BN220". The branded gps seems to pick up about 26-29 satellites as opposed to about 15-20 with the non branded one.

I found it very tricky at the start shouldering up the connections at first as I had probably not shouldered anything for about 20 years. I could having a large magnifying glass/light helped a lot. I bought one off Allie express. Using it I could I could just do all the shoulders on a flat surface. I didn't need a vice. I also managed to brake a reed switch trying to bend the wires into shape. I learnt to only bend from the wire end and not the glass.

I also found not having too much excess wire left after connecting everything made it fit in the box much nicer. Even cutting the wires for the gps module different lengths depending on how far from the slot made a difference.

I also managed to burn out the fuse on the board that connects the battery and had to shoulder the battery to the VBAT connection and a ground. I didn't have much luck shouldering the wireless charger to the board and settled for extending the wires on the wireless charging pad and plugging it into the micro USB port.

I only have Linux on my computers at home so I had to get a friend to load the firmware the first time using windows 10. I did spend. A morning having a crack with a very old copy of windows 7 but couldn't get it to work. It was pretty straight forward on windows 10 and worked just about first go from memory.

my friend also had a 3d printer so I got 2 of flex's boom mounted boxes made up. I can't really comment on how hard the 3d print part of the project was as I wasn't really involved. My friend said he just loaded it up and walked away though so it must have gone pretty smooth. I'm not sure what type of printer he used.

I had a bit of running around to do to find the 3mm polycarbonate face glue and potting epoxy. I think I messaged flex about 6 times trying to figure it out.

I ended up getting it from a crew on the Southside of briz called acrylics online. They also had the glue called weld on #16. I did find the Dichloromethane for sale on line but the weld on worked well. I ordered the potting epoxy off eBay.

All the bits fitted into the 3d case pretty well with a bit of a light sanding. I also coated the outside of the case in epoxy to seal it as that was about all I had and it seemed to work ok. I bought a dermal tool as well which is really handy. I sanded the edges of the polycarbonate face to try and get a good bound with the case and it seemed to work ok. I just lightly clamped them.

The potting epoxy was good as well. It had a long cure time. About 72 hours I think. One of the cases l leaked from around the faceplate I think so it needed to be topped up a bit. I had to top up the unit once it had cured a bit as well. I used a couple of syringes I bought from chemist warehouse for 40c each. They where only small at about 5ml I think. There where a few air bubbles in the cases but they mostly came out. One one of the units there are a few really small ones over the screen. They don't cause any problem reading the screen. The other one was clear.

Lastly I gave them all a bit of a sand and bought some bungee cord from Bunnings to attach them to the boom. I just tied the bungee cord together. I don't know if you can buy small loops of it pre joined or not.

thanks to jan for doing the hard work writing the software and design and flex for the 3d case and advice to try and assemble it. I really enjoyed the process and I would encourage anyone interested to have a go building one. If anyone in the briz area would like help just let me know and I would be happy to. You can borrow what ever I have here.

thanks Shannon.

Nice Shannon,
Interesting you have the reed switches on the back of the board, is there any trouble getting them to work there?

I had another play on linux today.
I think, the usb needs to be mapped to a com port.
I did this years ago getting GW60 software working in wine.
I booted up the ancient OS, and had a play trying to install Aduino in the wine version with mapped com ports. Unfortunately this wine version only supports up to Win 8, and the W10 Ardunio wouldn't run, a few DLLs missing etc. This attempt has also gone in the too hard basket. But somebody with more skill could probably get it working.

I think i have got the Arduino 1.8.19 development environment working on Manjaro Linux. I followed this walk through. i didn't have to install any kernel drivers as i think the have been mainlined.

randomnerdtutorials.com/installing-the-esp32-board-in-arduino-ide-mac-and-linux-instructions/

in step 2 i selected ESP32 Dev Module.

It came up with a couple of errors before working. I googled the and found a couple of terminal commands to solve the problem.

the first error i got was
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'serial'

I had to install pip.
sudo pacman -Syu python-pip

then install pyserial.
pip3 install pyserial

the second error was
A fatal error occurred: Could not open /dev/ttyACM0, the port doesn't exist

I had to change permissions on the port. (It looks like this command didn't survive a reboot so need to run it every time.)
sudo chmod a+rw /dev/ttyACM0

the WIFI scan worked after i did this. I'll try and flash the board in the morning.

Thanks Shannon, I'll give that a go later.

Not me yet, I've run into a python PATH problem, trouble is there's several ideas how to fix it. And I've seen people having big problem playing with python. Could be a Ubuntu/Mint thing.

SILLY OLD FART, time helps if you have it plugged in and turned on!

So now, I have uploaded OTA, just need to put the config file on the SD cards

HMMMMMMMMMMM so I've modified the config file and loaded it to the SD card, but it's not having any effect.
Maybe I should just load an unmodified one to see if I've done something wrong.
I've checked it's formatted to fat32.

I got it to work on one of the boards and the other one seems to have failed. The sdcard seems to be no good so I will try and get another one the next couple of days and see if I can get it sorted. I don't know the difference between the 2 boards.I am sure all the code is good. It'll be operator error I'm sure.

I use 16 GB sd-cards with no problems. Can you send me your config.txt file ? Send you a PM with my email.

Thanks Peter, but no improvement, as I expected, because neither Jan's nor Elmo's config file made any difference either.
The display reports, "no SD port,"
Yes card is in the right way round, and I haven't changed anything on yours, Jan's or Elmo's files. And the same files do work with an old SD card from one of my early loggers.
Everything points to the bulk purchased cards.
I'm going to try formatting them with "sdformatter" and see what happens. If not I'll get the cheapest card I can from Woolworths and see if that works.