Portable GPS barometer UTC Clock

 

Often, in portable I have to use the phone to check for Maidenhead QTH Locator and UTC for logging purposes.

Looking into my junk box I found that i have a lot of ESP based development boards (NodeMCU) and even a uBlox GPS that I bought several years ago and never put it to work.

Also, a small 1.28" SPI TFT was there, waiting...

So, I made a little box usefull for portable/outdoor ham things...

The main feature of this box is to show the UTC and Maidenhead locator as we use this very often into the field but working on this project I thought why not add a barometer and see the pressure.
The next step was to show the evolution of the QNH in time to see if there are some worring variations and a little graph was added.

So, overall, here are the features:

- GPS Coordinates; Lat, Lon, Alt (this need good GPS reception).

- UTC time;

- Maidenhead Locator with 6 symbol precision, good enough for sending it to a correspondent.

- QNH with graphic representation.

- Battery voltage indicator for the LiIon cell.

 The barometric pressure is read at about 15 seconds and averaged for 10 readings then a pixel is drawn on the TFT graph area. For 126 pixels, we will have a history of atmospheric pressure for the last around 45 minutes.

The colours can be easy changed by changing the code.

My little box is powered by one 2000mA LiIon cell which can give around 7 hours of usage. 

The code is available on GitHub.