NEO-6M.md

NEO-6M GPS module

The NEO-6M is a GPS module communicating via UART. It provides the current position of the device.

Wiring

The NEO-6M module has four pins in total.

NEO-6M Pin	Raspberry Pi Pin
GND	GND
VCC	VCC (5 V)
RX	TX (GPIO 14)
TX	RX (GPIO 15)

The RX pin on the module can be skipped and is not needed for now.

Configuration

Check if the module is wired correctly and sends some data:

cat /dev/serial0

It might return lines like this:

$GPTXT,01,01,01,NMEA unknown msg*58

If not, try this instead:

tail -f /dev/serial0

If /dev/serial0 does not exist, try it again with /dev/ttyAMA0 instead. In that case, you have to change this value in the config.yaml as well.

If the blue LED on the module is blinking, it has already found its position and sends messages with the position. Go outside or close to a window and wait a few minutes if it does not blink.

Open a python console and test it out:

>>> import serial
>>> import io
>>> import pynmea2
>>> device = serial.Serial('/dev/serial0', baudrate=9600, timeout=0.5)
>>> io_wrapper = io.TextIOWrapper(io.BufferedReader(device))
>>> while True:
...     data = io_wrapper.readline()
...     if data[0:6] == '$GPGLL':
...         message = pynmea2.parse(data)
...         print('lat:', message.latitude, 'lon:', message.longitude)