Sunday, 2 July 2017

DRONE: Ublox Neo M8N GPS + SP Racing F3 Wiring

I have been toying with adding GPS to my quadcopter and after doing some research I went ahead and purchased the Mini Ublox M8N Neo GPS Receiver from banggood.

The banggood site has a few different options for different flight controllers, but the SP racing version doesn't come with a compass. I have the Eachine version of the SP racing board that didn't come with a compass, barometer or altimeter so I bought the APM version and decided I would replace the connectors to suit my board.

The SP Racing F3 manual says that the connectors are JST-XH but I ordered a few and was disappointed to discover they were the wrong ones for my Eachine version of the SP racing board.
After ordering a few types, I discovered the type on my board are the JST-SH 1.0mm (at least for the 4 pin ports).

I found out the hard way that the little piece of paper that comes with the device is misleading.
I was expecting that I would need to cross TX/RX from the GPS device when connecting to the FC, so I wired based on that and got stuck for a while trying to work out why my device wouldn't connect to my FC. It took me a while to realise that I should have been following the diagram below from the banggood website.


Once I fixed this the device connected immediately and functioned as expected. By default my device was working at 9600 baud.