Last Updated on 1 April 2022 by Suffocation

Another add-on board for the Arduino Uno and compatible. It is equipped with a u-blox GPS chip. Additionally, it has a slot for a µSD card and therefore lends itself well as a GPS logger. The version 1.0 presented here has already been superseded by a version 2. The new version is relatively expensive due to the current chip shortage and costs around €40-50. Version 1.0 costs only a quarter of that.

The beauty of the circuit board is the selectable ports for the GPS chip. Ports 0-7 are available for this purpose.

The circuit board I have seems to have a few issues; I wasn't able to access the SD card.

If you are operating the circuit board yourselves, you might have a tip for me. If so, please leave a comment.

Facts

Arduino Uno / Leonardo compatible add-on board
GPS u-Blox NEO-6M GPS Receiver
SD card slot
Reset button
Jumper array for setting the UART pins for the GPS module

Periphery	Description	Pin
GPS	UART RX	0-7
	UART TX	0-7
SD card	SPI MOSI	11
	SPI MISO	12
	SPI SCL	13
	SPI CS	10

NEO 6-m Shield v1.0 – Pin Assignment

Areas of application

GPS logger

Views

NEO 6-M GPS Shield - Oben — NEO-6M GPS Shield – Top

NEO 6-M GPS Shield - Unten — NEO-6M GPS Shield – Top

Programming

Libraries

GPS

NEO-6M GPS Shield – TiynGPSPlus Library in Librarian

https://github.com/mikalhart/TinyGPSPlus

Software Serial

Part of the Arduino Library

https://www.arduino.cc/en/Reference/softwareSerial

https://github.com/arduino/ArduinoCore-avr/tree/master/libraries/SoftwareSerial

SD Library

The SD library is part of the Arduino framework.

https://www.arduino.cc/en/reference/SD

https://github.com/arduino-libraries/SD

Test programme

I have created/adapted two test programmes and they can be found at the following link:

https://github.com/sfambach/arduino/tree/master/shields/NEO-6M_GpsLoggerShieldV1/examples

SDCardTestOutput

GPSTest Output

It can take up to 20 minutes for the GPS to stabilise.

NEO-6M GPS Shield - GPS Test Program Output

Problems

Loose connection

Resoldering the connections and contact spray didn't help me, any other ideas?

Miscellaneous

...

Conclusion

If the SD card control worked, this would be a really useful add-on board. I'm assuming I just got a Monday model. Unfortunately, I only ordered one board this time. The Arduino pins are passed through, so other add-on boards can still be used.