 This week's IonMPI by DigiKey and Adafruit. Thank you DigiKey. It's from ST. Lady Edda, what is this week's IonMPI? So normally, you know, we cover ST stuff and we've done their wireless chips and we've done their sensors. Of course, they're a massive company, so they have a lot of chips that they design and come out with. But I saw this pop up on the digikey.com slash new and what's interesting is I didn't know that such a thing existed. It's a GPS unit that has dead reckoning built into it with sensor and wheel tick, you know, a DOM at our capability. So this is part of a family called Tezio and this is the VIC 3DA. The A is for automotive. The 3D, I think, stands for like three-dimensional and VIC, I don't know. But it's part of their, you know, it's automotive but it's also really useful for robotics. So it's like, yes, this stuff is used for cars but we know where stuff is used for cars. I also think it's often used, really good use, often very good for use with art projects or mechatronics or robotics or installations or what have you. I'm sure there's a good reason to use this. And so first up, GPS, you know, we've had GPS stuff on IonMPI and of course at Adafruit. We sell a lot of GPS stuff. There's all these constellations. The original one is called GPS for global positioning service and that's our global positioning system and that's the American. Well, it's actually global navigation system is what you would normally call it. And there's now other global navigation systems available. So, you know, there's Beidu, there's QZSS, that's the Japanese one. There's Glonass, there's the Russian one and there's the Galileo, that's the European one. So there's like five or six systems. Not all of them are up and running but what's cool about this GPS unit or GNSS unit, I'm going to call it GPS, but just it could recognize more than just the American constellations. It works with all of them. So that's kind of good because it means that even if you don't have great visibility for one set of satellites, you'll be able to get the other set of satellites. And that's handy because a lot of times one of the most popular things that GNSS is used for is navigation, whether it's automotive navigation or of course robotic navigation or human navigation. And you want to know where you are and the cool thing about GNSS is that as long as you've got a vision of the sky, you can use it anywhere in the world. It works anywhere as long as you can see the sky, which is of course the thing which is well, what if you can't see the sky? Well, if you can't see the sky, it doesn't work at all. You have to be able to see, you know, I think three or four different satellites at a time in order to triangulate your position on Earth. So what happens if you're in a tunnel or what happens if you're in a canyon like New York City? New York City has some parts of the city where you pretty much can't get GPS or if you could, it's not trustworthy because the signal's bouncing off of these glass buildings and you're getting distorted signals and so you kind of end up sort of jumping around. If you've ever been in a city and you're like, why is it think I'm three blocks away? It's because the GPS signal is bouncing around and you're not getting it directly so you're not able to triangulate as well. So historically, you know, the way we did, and this is kind of interesting that this GPS module, GNSS module combines, you know, satellite tracking with what's called dead reckoning. So dead reckoning is, you know, an ancient way of measuring where you are and it's exactly, you know, kind of what you would think people would first invent for navigation. If you know where you are and you have a map and you know your compass direction where you're moving, you just, you know, count the number of steps and then, you know where you've ended up. And this is what basically, this is the only thing you could do before GNSS. I mean, you could, of course, use the stars and you could use clocks and stuff to do some sort of navigations. But the problem with dead reckoning is it's very susceptible to error. You know, it's a great idea, right? If you really know exactly how many feet you've stepped in one direction, exactly the direction, then yes, of course, you're going to be able to determine where you are. But in reality, without a reference pointer map to keep you along, you know, even a small, you know, change in an angle, you think you turn 90 degrees, but you really turn 89 degrees, and suddenly the error magnifies the more and more you go. So, you know, dead reckoning is something that people have done, you know, as humans just using compasses. But with technology, like using tilt compensated compasses and, you know, a more calibrated way of measuring distance, not just using like knots on a rope, like in nautical miles. But using a wheeled tech counter, you can do a much better job of determining where you're at. So, the Live 3F, which is the, we're talking about the three Vic 3D, which I think is like the dev kit, but this family has the GNSS module, right, with multiple constellation supports, so it can get data from anywhere. And it's got like data logging, it's got firmware upgrade, I'm sure there's an ST chip inside of it. It does it such a GNSS, and that's where you get data from a web, you know, you can get data from a website or over cellular to help it get the almanac of data so it can get a fix much faster. But it has that odometer in it. And what's neat is that you can see that you can get a fixed rate of up to 30 Hertz when you use the odometer, like it'll actually get you data quite quickly. If you've got that odometer and built into it is a six DoF tilt compensated compass. And so as an aside, if you're wondering, hey, how come like, did you gain eight of you do not have any compasses in fact, like you can't get like any electronic compass chips anymore or nine DoF sensors, all automotive devices and GPS is used compasses to do, you know, basic dead reckoning type measurements. And so there's all going to the automotive industry is one of the one of the things that you haven't been able to get compass sensors for quite a while. So yeah, so the Tessio is is there's a firmware system. It gives you Namiya data, but you could also give it it's got these two pins forward, which is direction and wheel tick, and you tell it, you know, how many you know how how wide your wheels are. And then of course, it can calculate how far you've gone each direction. And then using the compass inside you see there's an accelerometer and a magnetometer combined together tilt tilt compensated compass, magnetometer you know which direction you're going, you know how far you're going thanks to the wheel tick, boom, you've got dead reckoning and this firmware does it all for you. And believe me, having had to write dead reckoning software, you don't want to do it. It's much better for the module doesn't for you. So the module is ready to go and it's got you are it's got I squared C. It's got, you know, antenna staff control, PPS wake up IRQs and of course, we'll tick and forward. You can also I saw in the data sheet you can send the media data with the odometer separately. So if you don't use wheel tick and forward back, like let's say you want to like literally count steps for human. Or maybe it's not if you add a wheel maybe there's some other way you're doing maybe a vision system to determine distance. You can send that data over in the media. So it would take that and then you know, merge it into what GPS or GNSS data it's got and then give you that dead reckoning output. And if you want to get started really fast, the did you key also has in stock, this dev kit and the dev kit kind of does everything for you. So you like, don't need to do the power supply in the case and the antenna. It's got panel, it's got SD card for logging. I think it's got some ST chip in it. It's got the module. It's like 200 bucks and he basically has everything you could possibly need. So honestly, you probably couldn't really make this for less than the dev kit costs. So if you're just if you have a robot or if you have a car automotive thing or agricultural electronics, if you wanted to quickly get your dead reckoning stuff going. Add this in I think this I think dead reckoning is a good alternative where you can't use RTK. Yeah, especially if you're out in the middle nowhere, you can't use Wi Fi system GPS. It is completely standalone and that's that's kind of nice. And you know, it's not as expensive as having to manage your own RTK network. And it's also got some software that comes with it for testing. And you can, you know, check the check the this example is for the valve board. But of course, it'll work with just the raw module. It just takes the US UART data, you know, you can get it over to a USB UART converter and use it to play around with your module. And you can even see the user flags for all the different constellations in the satellite tracker. Available on Digikey. Here's the part number and the short URL. You can have this now. And it's very competitive with other similar GPS module makers. So they're definitely going in pretty strong. Ironically, getting a six DOF sensor is about the same price as this GPS GNSS module. So do check it out. I got some samples coming on the way as well. You know, either grab the module and you'll have to add your own antenna and you know, your own circuitry. Or did you get the all in one of our board? It comes in a nice metal case. And you just mount it, you know, add an external antenna and you're ready to rock. And that's this week's iron MPI.