 and welcome to the show, it's me, John Park. It's JP's product pick of the week and we are here once again, ready to check out a cool new product. Thanks for stopping by. I wanna thank everyone over in Discord. Hello, people in Discord. Hello, people in the YouTube chat. Also over in Facebook land. I can't keep an eye on it all, but if you're wondering where the discussion is happening, it's gonna be right over there in Discord. So head on over there, check it out. It's Adafruit Discord under Adafru.it slash Discord. You can go to that short link and get a instant invite and jump on in and enjoy the fun. So go good, someone tells me the audio is good. I'm glad to hear it. Let's get on with it. So the first thing I wanna do is I want to send you to this product page because if you watch the show from inside the product page, first of all, good for you, you're surrounded by all kinds of good Adafruit productness. Second of all, you're gonna get a discount right there if you order during this show, during the timeframe of this show, you'll get a 50% off. That's the product page right there and that's the QR code. So if you wanna point a device at that and jump on over to the page, watch the video from right inside of there. If you do, this is what you're gonna see, that's product page right there. I'm gonna go ahead and refresh mine because what you're gonna see is that price will magically, maybe not magic, maybe technology has something to do with it. Look, it just jumped 50% off. But I've already ruined the surprise, you know what the product is, but let's rewind a little bit and have Lady Aida tell us about this product. So take it away, won't you, Lady Aida? Yes, third but not least is a mini GPS GNSS. So this is a global positioning satellite sensor. It is its tiniest one I've ever seen. It's just so adorable, it's called the PA-1010 because it's 10 millimeters by 10 millimeters by about like six millimeters. So we fit it onto a board about one inch by one inch and it has the antenna built on top. Now we're indoors so I couldn't do a demo of it getting GPS data anyways because it wouldn't work from indoors. You do have to be outdoors. But it works pretty well. It's got good sensitivity, good tracking. Once it's outside and it gets ephemeral data, it knows where you are. And what's nice about this GPS is most GPS's are UART only. And it does have UART connectivity over here. We have the RX and TX and power and ground pins and they're all level shifted and that's wonderful. But in addition, it also has I squared C which is why we're able to chain it along these other I squared C sensors. And we've updated our code for the Arduino and circuit Python libraries. So what's neat is there's a lot of single board computers that don't have I squared C, sorry they don't have UART but they do have I squared C. Or other chips that again usually don't have spare UART or you want to use software serial and it's kind of messy. It's a lot nicer to use I squared C because you don't have as precise timing needs and you can read the data much faster and you can share the bus. So this is on address 10. And then on the back we have a spot. We give you a battery holder. We didn't start it on because we actually wanted to, people might want to keep this as slim as possible because when you add the coin cell it does get a little chunkier but we like a removable coin cell so you can always make sure it's fresh and if it gets damaged or runs out you can always replace it. But a GPS on the back will ensure that even when power is cut it retains that ephemera status so that you don't have to re-download it. It gives you a faster fix on a restart. And it has a PPS LED, so pulse per second output. People like that. It has a sleep mode. So you can put it into sleep mode where it saves the ephemera status but it isn't actively receiving because it uses about 20 to 30 milliamps doing that. And then you send it a command to wake it up. So it's a very nice, it's a nice capability that isn't on some GPS's. So it's a very cute, it's the smallest GPS we've seen and with I squared C capability I'm really liking this little fellow. Yay, GPS. Bring my audio back in there. I'm gonna go grab one from my good old mystery cabinet of wonders and cool things. Right back there. I know it's name changes every time. That's part of its wonder. I'm gonna go grab that, be right back. Yes, so that is my product pick of the week this week. It is the PA-1010D, which is a mini GPS module in STEM at QT format. And as you'll notice here I've actually got it plugged into a really long cable. I'm using our active I squared C terminator so that I can get my antenna outside of my workshop so we actually pick up some satellites. So there it is, admire it. We're not gonna see it for a while cause I'm actually gonna run this out the door so that it's facing the sky. Get that up there. And now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna jump down into an overhead camera view where you'll see, put on some glasses here so I can read it too, what I've got set up here. I have a feather, this is the RP2040 feather, which has this very convenient STEM at QT cable connector to it, and I have that running too. One of our lovely little OLED screens and then there's that I squared C terminator, active terminator I mentioned. That allows me to run this over a long wire so I've got about 25 feet of ethernet cable, cat five cable running over there. So here we can see some of the data getting downloaded from the satellites. This is a global navigation satellite system or GNNS, or GNSS receiver. And what that means is this uses a whole bunch of different systems. So GPS is the most famous one. That's the one that the US set up back in I think 1974 or 78, yeah, 78, I took some notes. But then there's also the GLONASS system that the Soviet Union at the time, no, it would have been Russia at the time. No, in the 80s, so it would have been Soviet Union. Now Russia runs their own global system so you can use it anywhere in the world as well as the European Galileo system. And then this satellite not only can use all of, or this GPS unit can not only use all of those systems but it also uses some of the augmentation satellite systems which use things like other satellites, planes, ground stations, I think even cell towers. So there's this huge mix of things that can be used and this is grabbing using the Circuit Python library that we have here or the Arduino library. It is grabbing from a bunch of satellites. As you can see here, this is telling me my latitude and longitude. And just so you know, I'm actually running this through a bit of a scrambler so that you're not seeing my actual address. I think this will take you somewhere in Peru. That's not where I live. Then it's telling us our altitude, the fixed quality and the fixed quality actually refers to how it's getting the data if it's a, I think it ranges from zero to eight and these are more like categories, things like, it's just data that's been sitting around on the unit since the battery was last unplugged or it's live coming off of satellites or it's an augmented data. So I believe fixed quality of two is one of the ones that we like because it means we're getting active location data from the satellites. And then you can see here, it's actually telling me that it's getting 11 or 10 satellites that it's seeing right now in the sky. So generally speaking, you need four satellites to get a fix on location. There's cases where you can just use three if you know something like your altitude. But we've got 11 or 10 happening right now. So clearly we're grabbing from a couple of different systems because there's probably only four or five, maybe six visible in the sky right now for each one of those systems where I am. So pretty cool. Let's take a look now at some of the info on this. If I take a jump over here to the product page and let me put my little viewer there so you can see that info. So if we look at the product page, this is gonna show you right now, this is 50% off. So normally 29.95 US, if you wanna buy this during this show, you can buy a limit of 10 of them and they're only $14.98 for a really tremendous GPS or global navigation satellite system unit. This gives you a little bit of info on the page here, including some of those systems I mentioned, GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, QZSS I believe is one of the augmented systems that's localized to Japan. This does that as well. Talks about its sensitivity, the number of channels it can check. So this unit will read up to 33 signals simultaneously. So that's 33 satellites that you could be getting your info from a whole lot. It can track all of those. And a lot of other info, including what Lady Aida mentioned, you can use this over UART for serial. You can use this using I squared C, which is how I'm using it right now over the STEM of QT. There's also an RTC battery connector. I didn't actually add mine, but that will keep the real-time clock going and it'll keep that ephemeris data stored. You can even do some pretty high-end features with this chip and unit, the little package that we have on here does logging data as well. So there's some info on the manufacturer's data sheet about that. If we click on, speaking of the data sheet, if we click on the learn guide page down here, that'll take us to the overview, some of the info we just saw, as well as how to set it up, the different pinouts, how to set up an Arduino, how to use it with circuit Python or on a Python-based setup on a computer. And if you go over to the download section, here is this PA-1010D data sheet. And there it is. So this unit's a little confusing. This unit actually has a chip set that's the MT-3333, but the coupling of this with the antenna, and I think some of the other goodies on there is what makes up the PA-1010D from CD Technology. This CD top, this mentions some of the use cases, some of its special features, the different channels that it'll read on, some applications. Notably, this is a really small unit and it doesn't require an external antenna. In fact, I can't use an external antenna. So notice on there is mentioned surveillance, which I can imagine if you need something to track something, you might include this in it. I don't know, I'm not gonna surveil anything. The name 1010 comes from the fact that it's 10 millimeters by 10 millimeters, a little small square size unit. And let's see, what else in here? One interesting feature of it is that it will actively cancel the harmonics of other radio frequencies nearby, including Wi-Fi, the different cellular radios as well as Bluetooth. So it's really designed to be in a system, integrated into a system that has a lot of other possible interference going on. It'll reject that interference. And let's see, yeah, so this is some of the main interesting facts about it. Here is a look at the library, the Circuit Python library. If you look at the Python code itself on GitHub, you can see a whole bunch of what's going on behind the scenes, some of the different things you can ask it for. If you look at the code, let's jump into, this is the code I'm running on it. And let me make that a little bit bigger so it's a little easier to see. You know what I'm gonna do, in fact, if you look here in the serial output, I have a little screen session running. So that's the live data coming from the satellite as, or the GPS unit as it's polling those satellites. So you can see we've got our scrambled latitude and longitude, the fixed quality is mentioned here. There's time stamping that's going on, as well as the fixed quality, height, horizontal ID. So there's a whole bunch of extra info that you can get in there. And if you look at my, I'm gonna close this just because that scrolling is gonna drive me mad. If you look at my code here, you can see what's going on. A lot of this is to do with the display that I'm using, but here's the key thing, we import this Adafruit GPS library and then I do some stuff to set up iSquared C and the display, these are the labels that I'm gonna print out to my little screen. Here is the setup for the GPS and there's a few included in this example sketch that you can get in the examples folder when you download the library bundle that'll tell you how to use it in both UART mode as well as iSquared C. And then there's some commands being sent to the unit. This is the format of commands that are written to it, kind of like writing commands to a modem in the old days. And it tells the GPS unit what we want to get returned back. And then in the main loop of the program, every second we're gonna do this GPS.update call. And then what we get back from that is this whole slew of data, which we can then choose to parse and that's what I've got being parsed here. So the GPS timestamp in UTC time for the month, day, year, hour, minute, second, those aren't always available, but when they are, we can use those. And then here's the key ones, latitude and longitude. You just simply ask for GPS.latitude, GPS.longitude. I'm doing a little bit of math to multiply them by my little sort of randomization that I have in an outside file so I don't accidentally show it to you. I called this Tiki because I figured if I didn't do this I was gonna have to invite everyone over to my house for Tiki drinks and we probably can't do that. We probably don't have the budget for that right now. I don't know. So then we go and we can grab some of these other things like the satellites. This will tell us how many satellites are being grabbed. So you can see right now I've got 12 satellites as well as altitude, the speed. So this can be used for movement if you've ever used a GPS even on your phone. If you've used a GPS in your car, you know that it can very accurately tell you your speed. In fact, more accurately than a lot of speedometers and cars, from what I understand. As well as the tracking angle. I'm not sure what horizontal dilution is honestly, but maybe someone in the chat does. And let's see. Someone asked am I on a massive plane because the original altitude was 140 meters? Yeah, that might be a number that I'm messing with. Can't remember on that one. Is that right? Is that what it's saying? Let's see. Altitude 183 meters, is that right? I don't know. I am in Peru after all, right? Johnny Burto says, and by massive plane you mean flat earth? Yes. So that's the basic usage of it. It's very straightforward. Let me go grab the unit back from outside here. And something pretty exciting about this unit is, as you can see, let me change my screen here real quick. As you can see from the nice small size here and the ease of integrating it with either I squared C using the pins or the STEMAQT breakout or with UR using these other pins, this is a nice small unit that you could use for things like small embedded projects. If you've ever seen GPS based puzzle boxes where a box unlocks itself only when you're at a certain location, this would work pretty well for it. I believe, someone tell me if I'm wrong on this, I believe that originally there was a five meter accuracy with US GPS system. I believe with some of the augmentation in the other satellite systems, particularly Galileo, the European satellites, you get about one meter accuracy. So the European system is I believe at a higher altitude and I'm not sure what particulars make it more accurate but I believe you can get anywhere between five meters and one meter accurate. So fairly tight accuracy. I know at one point in the 80s that was dumbed down and then it was in the 90s I believe it was brought back up to a high accuracy even for civilians. So really cool package. You can see there there's that little spot for the battery or for a cat mask I think. That looks like cat woman symbol. I don't have that here, that little battery pack but that is it. So this is, if you don't mind, I'll point yet to that URL again. If you wanna go and get one, you can get it for 50% off right now which is real steal. If you're ever thinking of using one of these for a project, Technobabble in the chat over on YouTube asks how well would this work on a drone? I would imagine that would work really well on a drone. You have a nice clear, if you're outdoors with your drone which most people are, you have a nice clear view of the sky, I think you'd be able to get it quite accurate. Yeah, and another question is does this require, just like most any GPS, yes, it requires a pretty unencumbered view of the sky. It doesn't have an external antenna so you sort of need to use this outdoors. So let me see, let me jump back to a straight full view here and let me get this thing right side up again. In fact, I'm gonna unplug this so we're probably gonna see our display go away. Yeah, it's just gone to an error message. That is my product pick of the week. It's the PA-1010D and it is a mini GPS in STEMIQT format for use with I squared C and UART. And I forgot, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna steal that cable because I forgot to make a little hang tag for that. But luckily I can usually get away with it with these little STEMIQT cables. I'll just plug one into either side and we'll have a sort of improvised hang tag for it. There we go, I'm gonna place that on my little STEMIQT board of goodness, which is getting filled up there. Thank you so much for stopping by. That's gonna do it for another episode of JP's product pick of the week. And if I can, oops. Oh, I didn't have the product name up there that whole time, screwed something up. Oh well, I think you know what it is, right? It's this. It is the PA-1010D, UART and I squared C STEMIQT mini GPS. That is easy for me to say. All right, thanks everyone and I'll see you next time. Bye bye.