A device that always points to where you want to go. Using the Azure Sphere
See build logs and progress over on https://www.element14.com/community/people/Workshopshed/blog
A device consisting of an Azure Sphere connected to a serial GNSS satellite reciever and stepper motor with a pointer on the motor shaft. As the device is moved it will log its position and calculate what direction a pointer needs to point so that it's always pointing at the same destination.
Where would your pointer point? To your true love? To Home? To a different place depending on the time of day?
The GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) reciever is a NEO M8N this serial module streams the details of the satellite it detects using a protocol called NMEA. The project will need to filter out the right messages, and parse these to provide the location back to the code.
Although the Azure Sphere does not need to use the Azure IOT hub to work, I'll take advantage of the "Device Twin" functionality to pass the co-ordinates from a web UI back to the device.
The FunctionApp folder contains the code for an Azure function that calculates a bearing based on two sets of co-ordinates. Thanks to Chris Veness for the function https://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong.html which I've ported to C#. This function will be called from the Azure Sphere using the CURL library.
The stepper motor for the is a little 28BYJ-48 with a darlinton array to drive it. This will be driven from 4 of the GPIOs on the Azure Sphere. I based the code for the stepper on some I'd done for the Topsy Turvy Clock removing anything that wasn't essential and porting the rest across to the Sphere API.
