GPS receivers are a part of everyday life, you probably own several already and use them everyday, in your phone or in your car. Its really pretty amazing that you can find your position anywhere on Earth with just a small device you can fit in your pocket, but how does it actually work? In this talk we would like to guide you through the amazing technical journey that makes this possible and to open it up to the hacker community to explore.
Current GPS receivers found in mobile phones etc. are capable of about 5m accuracy but high-end receivers costing thousands can get this down to centimeters just using some more sophisticated algorithms and processing. This really opens up a lot of opportunities for UAVs and Quadcopters (and other applications we haven’t even thought of - what would you use it for?) and we would like to see this level of performance available in an open-source system.
We have developed and would like to share with you a new set of tools which we hope will make GPS accessible to hackers and experimenters; a library, libswiftnav, which contains a complete toolset for building a GPS receiver, and Piksi, a stand-alone hardware platform to run it on. The prototype is already very capable - we can’t wait to see what you can come up with.
Fergus Noble graduated in 2011 with an MSc. in Physics from the University of Cambridge, UK. Whilst at Cambridge he spent most of his spare time working on an 100km amateur rocket attempt which led to his frustration with available GPS systems. After graduating, he moved to California to work for Joby Energy on GPS systems for high-altitude wind turbines before co-founding Swift Navigation with Colin Beighley and Henry Hallam to work on a new open-source GPS receiver. He is also a co-maintainer of libopencm3, an open-source peripheral library for ARM Cortex-M based microcontrollers and creator of Plot-o-matic, an open-source tool for quickly visualising real-time data streams. https://github.com/fnoble
Colin Beighley graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2010 with a BS in Electrical Engineering. He worked at Joby Energy in Bonny Doon, California, before co-founding Swift Navigation with fellow GPS hackers Fergus Noble and Henry Hallam. He is the creator of softgnss_python, an open-source GPS/GNSS post-processing library.