REFERENCE.md

Reference

The PA1010D library communicates with the GPS over i2c, reading messages a byte at a time from a single register.

Messages are decoded using pynmea2.

• Getting Started
  • Installing (Stable)
  • Installing (Unstable)
• Function Reference
  • Update
  • Timestamp
  • Latitude & Longitude
  • Altitude
  • Number of Satellites
  • GPS Fix Quality
  • Speed Over Ground

Getting Started

The PA1010D Python library requires Python 3.4 or greater.

Most people should grab the code from GitHub and run our simple installer.

Installing (Stable)

git clone https://github.com/pimoroni/pa1010d-python
cd pa1010d-python
sudo ./install.sh

This ensures any dependencies are installed and will copy examples into ~/Pimoroni/pa1010d/

You can install just the pa1010d library from pypi by running:

sudo pip3 install pa1010d

Installing (Unstable)

To install the library and dependencies directly from GitHub you can specify the --unstable flag on ./install.sh:

git clone https://github.com/pimoroni/pa1010d-python
cd pa1010d-python
sudo ./install.sh --unstable

This will run setup.py install in the library directory instead of installing the library from pypi.

Function Reference

In all cases you'll first need to initialise a PA1010D library instance like so:

from pa1010d import PA1010D

gps = PA1010D()

Update

The PA1010D GPS is read over i2c via a single register. To guarantee that update has actually retrieved new data, the update function will poll for new data until a specific sentence type is decoded or a timeout is reached.

gps.update(wait_for="GGA", timeout=5)

By default the update function will wait 5 seconds for a "GGA" message, decoding and storing the information from any messages in the interim.

All positioning information is then read from properties.

Timestamp

gps.timestamp

The timestamp of the last GGA message decoded from the GPS

Latitude & Longitude

gps.latitude
gps.longitude

The latitude and longitude from the last decoded GGA message.

Altitude

gps.altitude

The altitude from the last decoded GGA message.

Number of Satellites

gps.num_sats

The number of satellites from the last decoded GGA message.

GPS Fix Quality

gps.gps_qual

The fix quality from the last decoded GGA message.

Speed Over Ground

gps.speed_over_ground

The speed over ground (in knots) from the last decoded RMC message.