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...
After few months of break finally managed to do some electronics stuff. Before i have tested GPS and SD card so now its combined. GPS data logging to an SD card in CSV format. The main part was to get NMEA data from GPS and convert it to one that i can use. $GPRMC,023042,A,3907.3837,N,12102.4684,W,0.0,156.1,131102,15.3,E,A*36 $GPRMB,A,,,,,,,,,,,,A,A*0B $GPGGA,023042,3907.3837,N,12102.4684,W,1,04,2.3,507.3,M,-24.1,M,,*75 $GPGSA,A,3,04,05,,,09,,,24,,,,,2.8,2.3,1.0*36 $GPGSV,3,2,11,09,47,229,42,10,04,157,00,14,00,305,00,24,70,154,33*79 $GPGLL,3907.3837,N,12102.4684,W,023042,A,A*5E $GPBOD,,T,,M,,*47 $GPVTG,156.1,T,140.9,M,0.0,N,0.0,K*41 $PGRME,8.4,M,23.8,M,25.7,M*2B $PGRMZ,1735,f*34 $PGRMM,WGS 84*06 $HCHDG,,,,15.3,E*30 $GPRTE,1,1,c,*37 $GPRMC,023044,A,3907.3840,N,12102.4692,W,0.0,156.1,131102,15.3,E,A*37 The above is NMEA data that comes our from UART of the GPS. Later capturing the following line to get latitude, longitude, fix, speed etc $GPGGA,023042,3907.3837,N,12102.4684,W,...