 Okay this week the first one is U-Blocks. That's right. I love featuring U-Blocks. They have such good quality products. They've been making GPS modules for 20-ish years. They, you know, I remember when they first came out with their first series and I was like, wow, these are really, this is really cool that they have GPS units that are so sensitive. Their specialty is, you know, the high quality, sensitive, a lot of information. There's cheaper GPSs but they only give you NMEA data and U-Blocks will usually give you a lot more and they're a lot more configurable and customizable. So their 10th generation of GPS modules are out. The Max M10, there's the S-Series and the M-Series. Both are very tiny. I'll show them on the overhead later but these are, you know, this is like a centimeter by a centimeter. They're very, very small. They don't have the antenna built in but they're very powerful and like I said, this is the 10th generation. So they're just improving and improving on the technology. So the Max M10, like I said, this is their super miniature module. You do have to add an external antenna. However, you know, data does come out of it. You know, once you connect the antenna, it can connect to up to four different GNSS satellite systems and it's been compatible with some previous products. Not all of them. I mean, I know like some of them were bigger. They've gotten smaller since then compared to like the rectangular style that were popular for so long. So there's the M10M and there's the M10S on the right and they are slightly different. So the M10M, I mean, they're both basically the same core on the inside. They connect to the same GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and Beidou. So GLONASS is Russian, Galileo is European, Beidou is Chinese. I believe GLONASS is up. I think Galileo and Beidou are not completely up yet but I have to check because I'm not, I don't subscribe to GPS daily. So I'm not totally up on which GNSS systems are up and running. Both have UART and I2C. We'll take a look at that. The M10S has slightly higher sensitivity because it has a additional low noise amplifier and saw filter. It also uses a temperature compensated oscillator that's the T under oscillator whereas the M10M has the crystal oscillator. So it's a little cheaper but it's again not as sensitive. So basically, you know, you want low cost, go with the M10M. Another nice thing is it goes up to 5 volts to 1.8 to 5 volts towards the M10S. It has a little bit of extra hardware in there, temperature compensated, only up to 3.3 volts but it gets you another, I think it'll show another 3 dB of sensitivity while tracking. So what it looks like and I think we'll look at the pinouts in a bit but basically inside is, you know, it's a microcontroller that handles the grabbing the data and doing the calculations and then converting it to the interfaces. So there is firmware running on it. The modules you can see here it has the RTC crystal and then the temperature compensated oscillator optional and then the low noise amplifier and the saw filter also optional on the S series not available on the M. There's power, there's VDDIO, there's VDDRF, there's a couple of power supplies and of course there's a V backup which is the coin cell or I think you can also use like small rechargeable alkaline or lithium coin cell, you know, solderable coin cells for battery backup to keep the RAM backed up so you don't have to re-download the entire Almanac each time. This is where you can see all this, you know, the specifications but basically the detail you want to look at, you know, for the difference between the two is in acquisition underneath sensitivity. The M10M has a negative 164 dBM and the M10S is a negative 167. It also has a slightly faster aided start otherwise it's pretty much the same. So just tracking is a little different otherwise they all have similar specs. And this is the pin out, very simple. I like how it's very straightforward. You can see there's a right hand side, there's time pulse out, that's pulse per second. There is the battery supply, the reset pin. Left has I squared C, right has UART, there's safe boot end because I think you can upload the firmware if you want, if you have custom firmwares because again there's a mic controller inside. And then there's an RF and LNA area which you'll talk about when you have an active antenna, you can use it to power the antenna and also do some detection. Okay so your interface, so you know standard your NMEA output is classic for GPS units. If you need that, you got it. This one is going to be default 9600 BOD but you can see it goes up to almost one megabit or down to 4,800. You know all these standard BOD rates that you can use of course if you haven't you know giving you 10 hertz updates and you have all the sentences enabled you'll want something fast like 115 or 230 kilobit per second 8 and 1. And then what I really like is they also have I squared C. I do like I squared C because you know for things like a Raspberry Pi computer or so even some microcontrollers they don't have an extra UART or it's annoying because you know UARTs are you have to buffer the data yourself so as each byte comes in you have to quickly put it in and into your buffer queue and then keep track of it whereas I squared C has its own internal buffer for I squared C and then if you see at the bottom there the register layout most registers aren't used you use registers fd and fe to read the number bytes in the queue and then you can just read continuously register OXFF to get data bytes in I don't know exactly how big the queue is probably like 64 128 bytes or something very handy you can run it at 400 kilobytes one thing I do want to mention I'm sorry kilobits per second there is a clock stretching interface so you know some some chips do not like clock stretching just something to be aware of you know earlier raspberry pies didn't do a great job with clock stretching you'd have to lower the frequency rate so you'll have to figure that out I don't know how long the clock stretches for but it is in my controller inside it's not a hardware I squared C interface these things are so small because they do not have a antenna like some modules that you might be familiar with and so you'll have to add either passive antennas what a passive antenna looks like in this case it has a ufl connector or an active antenna active antennas are powered by clean 3.3 volts biased into the rf line but of course you're going to get much better performance we know with the addition of the draws an extra like 10 to 50 milliamps whatever it takes this is an external antenna so which do you use it's totally up to you you get to decide because you get to put the circuitry in so this is what it would look like for an active antenna you see there is the antenna supply you have an RC filter and inductor to feed it into the antenna RF in if you're using a passive antenna you just leave all that out so super easy you decide which one it is there's also a antenna supervisor circuit which I kind of think is interesting and this is really handy because a lot of times people I've noticed people using you know they're using antenna and it gets disconnected or the ufl or there's a short and like my gps doesn't work it's very hard to debug a gps because basically either you get a fix or you don't so having an antenna supervisor is really handy it is a bunch of extra circuitry you have to add they do give you the layout so like this is the three pin circuit so it lets you detect open closed like shorted whatever is connected it basically does everything but it it does require you to see um you know comparator and a bunch of transistors that said if you want to build a really rigorous gps um into a product and you want to alert people that the antenna is not working or it's they maybe they connected the wrong kind of antenna um and the kind of thing is what makes your product a little bit better than just like hey you know either it works or it doesn't because again gps is so opaque like either you're getting nma sentences and either there's a fix or there isn't usually doesn't tell you why you're not able to get a fix um another thing that I thought was interesting as I was researching this is that they actually came with a kind of a cool idea I'm hoping I'm describing this correctly but they have things good stream things scream things stream which is their iot asset management you know servers because I do wi-fi and they do rtk and they do gps so it makes sense that they have their own iot back end that you can stream data and I believe they use mqtt but what's another interesting um thing is that you know normally when you have a gnss receiver right it's it's you're not getting the data from the satellites that's like telling you what your location is you get these you know time pulse signals and you take the calculation of the deltas and you figure out like okay based on like the movement through space and the almanac of where all the satellites are it'll calculate for you you can calculate your location by using triangulation however that does take energy and time and you have to have that almanac to know where every satellite is and so that's why it can take like 45 seconds to do you know cold start and then this idea which is like well what if you don't do that what if you don't have to keep track of the almanac you don't have to calculate you just as long as you can get a couple signals from three satellites um you can upload it to their service and their service will do all the math for you um so it's really really fast because you don't have to do a cold start and then as long as you do have some wi-fi connectivity maybe you have like a nbiot you know you can quickly um turn it on send some packets out of laura send out that timing data to their service and then it will calculate the location for you so it's an interesting idea because on one hand of course you have to have wi-fi or cellular connectivity but you don't have to keep track of as much like the gps doesn't have to do as much work and that's kind of an interesting idea like offloading the gnss calculation and then finally uh good timing there's actually a webinar that they're doing with digike in a week uh it's uh a week from now so sign up uh if you go to ublox or digike's twitter account they've just posted it it's also if you just google for ublox accelerate your wireless solution development um uses their explorer iot uh humidity and temperature sensors iam use sensorion uh micro e looks like the scd 40 or 41 there um it looks like a really cool way to get started with you know their their iot platform module that has wi-fi nbiot cellular laura bluetooth and uh it's got stem and qt and quick connectors on it so you can add more sensors and i think the webinar is free and you can pick up the explore iot kit which has one of these um i think max 10 gnss modules inside of it so it could be a really great way to get your asset track or gnss project up and running available at digike it's in stock that's right nine thousand of them it's over nine thousand um so they have the s in stock i think the m uh isn't but i will say one of the things is that like this wasn't this was not in stock when i first started the iam npi but it was like they were so cool i thought i would do it and then like two days ago suddenly they came into stock so i did get some i can show them on the overhead you want to show that video after they are yes but i just want to show this really quickly they have a cute little video but i just want to show how unbelievably small they are you don't have to let it refocus because it's it's so small it's so tiny um very tiny little module so they i mean it's amazing how small it is of course you'll need the antenna but the antenna usually goes on the outside anyways and it comes in uh tape and reel okay here's the video see on the other side yeah