Jordi Gauchía’s IceNav Turns an Espressif ESP32 Right into a Graphical, Offline, OpenStreetMap GPS

Maker Jordi Gauchía is trying to construct a handheld Espressif ESP32-powered gadget for offline navigation with graphical mapping, as a substitute for costly and infrequently locked-down industrial GPS items — and has just lately unveiled the third within the IceNav household.

“This venture started greater than 10 years in the past after I determined to check out a GPS module together with a [Microchip] ATmega328, to know the way it works and to start out studying concerning the world of GPS,” Gauchía remembers of the venture’s earlier prototypes. “I changed the Atmega328 with an ATmega644, added an SD card, a compass, and some different issues, and all the pieces was programmed from scratch. The preliminary venture was evolving.”

That preliminary prototype, although, would find yourself as so many others do: forgotten in a drawer. No less than, till final yr when Gauchía determined to revisit the venture — and utterly rebuild it, switching to the Espressif ESP32 platform from Microchip’s AVR vary. The IceNav V3, to present the present prototype its full identify, features a coloration 320×480 TFT touchscreen show, a magnetic compass, Bosch BME280 temperature, humidity, and stress sensor, and a International Navigation Satellite tv for pc System (GNSS) receiver suitable with the GPS constellation.

For mapping, the IceNav leans on the OpenStreetMap venture — a community-driven effort to ship high-accuracy street-level maps for the whole globe, free for all to make use of. These are loaded onto an SD Card, permitting the IceNav to function solely offline without having for an energetic web connection.

Whereas Gauchía admits that it is nonetheless very a lot a piece in progress, IceNav is already usable on a spread of ESP32-based growth boards. Extra info is accessible in Gauchía’s Hackaday.io write-up, whereas the venture’s supply code is accessible on GitHub beneath the reciprocal GNU Common Public License 3.