Orbital Telemetry: GPS Tracker to MicroSD

Reading a temperature sensor is local. Reading a GPS module connects the Arduino directly to a massive multi-billion dollar satellite constellation floating 12,000 miles in orbit. The GPS Portable Tracker project forces programmers to manage high-speed, catastrophic string parsing (NMEA decoding) while simultaneously handling the high-latency SPI hardware write procedures required to burn data permanently into a MicroSD card.

The NMEA Sentence Parsing Engine (TinyGPS++)

The U-Blox NEO-6M module communicates via standard Serial (Usually TX to Arduino Pin 4, RX to Pin 3 using SoftwareSerial).

1. The Raw Output: The GPS does not output "New York." Once a second, it vomits an incomprehensible encrypted string of comma-separated chaos: $GPRMC,081836,A,3751.65,S,14507.36,E,000.0,360.0,130998,011.3,E*62
2. You must utilize the <TinyGPS++.h> library architecture.
3. Every time SoftwareSerial.available() is active, you feed the tiny characters sequentially into the encoding engine:

while (gpsSerial.available() > 0) {
  gps.encode(gpsSerial.read()); // Feeds the raw characters to the parser!
}

if (gps.location.isUpdated()) {
  double currentLat = gps.location.lat(); // Instantly outputs clean decimal math (e.g. 37.8136)!
}

Writing Lat/Long to the SPI SD Card

Once the C++ extracts Lat=37.8, Lng=-122.4, it must permanently save it before the Arduino loses power on the drone or car.

• The MicroSD Card Module uses the intense SPI bus (MOSI/MISO/SCK).
• Opening and closing files on an SD card (SD.open("track.csv")) takes milliseconds, which can accidentally block the SoftwareSerial buffer and cause the Arduino to miss entire GPS satellites!
• The Execution: The code utilizes a heavily optimized formatting array. It concatenates the string: Lat, Lng, Alt, Time, Speed, opens the CSV file, blasts the string utilizing a single println(), and executes file.close() instantaneously!

Satellite Hardware Matrix

• Arduino Uno/Nano (Standard execution is sufficient).
• U-Blox NEO-6M GPS Module (Must have the active ceramic square antenna attached. It will generally completely fail to get a 3D satellite fix while sitting indoors).
• SPI MicroSD Card Adapter Module + blank 8GB SD Card.
• A battery pack (Power Bank or 9V) to carry the hardware outside under the open sky!