LILYGO TTGO T-Beam ESP32 GPS Tracker

[John Kemker]

https://www.banggood.com/LILYGO-TTG...&sc_uid=zTDBXOnakR&ID=513922&cur_warehouse=CN

Found this on Banggood today. Nice price! What do you think the possibility of it being pressed into rocket-tracking service?

 

[FMarvinS]

John-can't beat the price ($25); however, look at the reviews with one stating:
"Nice product. But no good documentation is provided. Pay attention, the libraries are not really available for this version 1.0. Many of them have errors. The official link with libraries is not up to date. I am at the moment also not able to get any GPS-information out of the GPS-Chip. "
If this is accurate, unless you have experience with coding so that one of the arduino based libraries can be used, I'd suggest waiting until version 2.0 or 3.0 is available. Also, the OLED if used is a separate purchase .
You might want to consider the relatively inexpensive time-proven egg-timer gps units. They also produce a 433 MHz version, but both Bangood's and the egg timer's 433 MHz units require a ham license to operate on the 70 cm band.
If you do acquire and use the Bangood's gps product, please provide your review of its utility.

Fred, L2
ICBM, S.C.
KG4YGP

 

[cerving]

You'll also need to write the software for it, and of course since it's a Ham product you'll have to make allowances for sending out your call sign ocasionally. And, you'll need something to receive the signal with and decode the data. As John Beans said recently, "Hardware is easy, software is hard."

 

[John Kemker]

I've got an Eggtimer unit and I love it.

Just pointing it out to anyone interested in playing with it.

 

[plugger]

You'll also need to write the software for it, and of course since it's a Ham product you'll have to make allowances for sending out your call sign ocasionally. And, you'll need something to receive the signal with and decode the data. As John Beans said recently, "Hardware is easy, software is hard."

Looks like there's an option for 900MHz which would eliminate the requirement for a HAM license.

 

[plugger]

Those little ESP32 boards are pretty sweet in terms of size and bang for buck from a processing perspective. My mate Craig has been working on a board to incorporate them into a GPS tracker/ 1 Watt transmitter / Flight computer / DTMF decoder all in one thing. You can read about it more here.

RocTrak board

Assuming the weather cooperates I'll fly the thing on Sunday to get some comparative data on the GPS resolution when compared to a uBlox 6 chipset.

 

[John Kemker]

Looks like there's an option for 900MHz which would eliminate the requirement for a HAM license.

Why would I want to eliminate the requirement for a HAM license? [grin]

73 de W5NNH