In the last couple of weeks some interesting new toys I ordered arrived. First, two MRF24J40MA wireless transceivers. I actually had them lying around for a while now, but I wanted to wait until the GPS receiver arrived as well before I start playing with them.
The transceiver operates in the 2.4 GHz band, has a data rate of 250 kbps and a range of about 120m, which is far better than the 10m range of bluetooth devices. Since I can’t connect them directly to an Android phone I intend to connect one of the transceivers to the Arduino on the boat, and the other transceiver directly to the bluetooth module which is currently running on the boat. That way I can put the bluetooth/transceiver module in my pocket and use it as some kind of wireless bridge to transfer data to and from the Arduino running the boat. Another bonus point of these transceivers: they only cost about 9€, which goes well with my intention to build this project as cheap as possible.
Second, the already mentioned GPS module arrived last week. I ordered it from Adafruit along with other stuff, and with around 30 € it is as cheap as decent GPS modules come.
I connected it to the Arduino for a quick test using the libraries and sample code provided by Adafruit and it worked fine, printing out the raw GPS data. Next will be processing of the data on the Android, calculating and logging location, speed etc. I’m really looking forward to this.