Colorado-based SparkFun Electronics has released two GPS and GNSS boards using automotive dead reckoning from Swiss company U-Blox.
 
The Zed-F9R Breakout and Zed-F9R pHAT allow for connection to multiple constellations including GPS, Glonass, Beidou, Galileo and QZSS. The Zed-F9R pHAT connects to a Raspberry Pi to bring GPS and GNSS capabilities to the platform.
 
“SparkFun has always been proud of the GPS and GNSS boards we’ve made in-house,” said Kirk Benell, SparkFun’s chief technical officer. “That makes us even more excited to be the first to develop not one, but two open source development platforms that utilise U-Blox’s Zed-F9R module. We’ve created unique real-time kinematics (RTK) as well as dead reckoning boards in the past, but these are the first boards that combine the two features into a single professional platform. Working on these boards has been a labour of love and we are excited to finally release them to the world.”
 
The Zed-F9R GPS-RTK dead reckoning breakout is a high precision, sensor fusion GNSS board with configuration options. It takes advantage of U-Blox’s automotive dead reckoning technology and provides an accurate, continuous position by fusing a 3D IMU sensor, wheel ticks, vehicle dynamics model, correction data and GNSS measurements.
 
The pHAT has the same high precision, sensor fusion GNSS board and configuration options as the GPS-RTK breakout, but with the ability for users to attach the pHAT to their Raspberry Pi to start navigating.