Custom ESP32-S3 development board — professionally manufactured by JLCPCB. A far cry from where it all started. It Started in a School Science Lab — Around 1998 Most people who get into electronics start with a kit, a tutorial, maybe a breadboard and some LEDs. I started by sneaking ferric chloride out of a school science lab to etch my first PCB. That was around 1998. I was living in the Maldives — a small island nation in the Indian Ocean — where there was no electronics supply chain, no maker community, no local PCB fab. Just a chemistry cabinet at school, a copper-clad board from somewhere, and a lot of curiosity. This post is about what the next 25+ years of PCB prototyping looked like from there. The early wins with proper chemicals, the years of improvisation when those chemicals disappeared, the real injuries, the failed boards, and finally — the moment JLCPCB changed ever...
Here is a thing that i have faced few times when it comes to GPS data. Below is the GPGGA string from NMEA data receives from GPS. I have highlighted the latitude and longitude from the string. $GPGGA,081902.00, 0412.75469 ,N, 07332.48758 ,E,1,08,0.97,10.7,M,-93.5,M,,*41 Latitude = 0412.75469 Longitude = 07332.48758 If you want to plot this in google maps or any other platform you need to convert this data to decimal degrees, which will be easy to point the location rather than using raw data. In order to do that please follow these steps and write your own math function for this. For my purpose i am using my own function to handle the conversions. First lets start with latitude. Get rid of the zero first. rawdate = 4 12.75469 in this case 4 is the degrees which is in blue color and minutes in green Formula: degrees = 4 minutes = rawdate - (100*degrees) minutes = 412.75469 - (100*4) minutes = 12.75469 So to find out the decimal ...