Design of a GPS data logger device with street-level map interface

The Global Positioning System (GPS) has now become a widely used aid to navigation and it is commonly used in many navigational applications such as land surveying, shipping, piloting, route guidance, map making, study of earthquakes, precise time reference, and hobbies and games such as geocaching. One of the problems with the early GPS system was its low accuracy which prevented it to be used in applications requiring high accuracy, such as piloting and street-level route guidance. With the recent introduction of the sophisticated error correction techniques such as the WAAS/EGNOS, the horizontal accuracy of a GPS system is nowadays around 10 m. This study describes the design of a microcontroller based GPS data logger device with Secure Data (SD) card storage and Google Map mapping interface. The device collects the user co-ordinates in a file on an SD card, and then the Google Map software is used to draw the track of the user on a street-level map.