U-blox PCI-5S - a cheap GPS module for your projects

 [Update] I have found the timepulse output!

The U-blox PCI-5S is the cheapest GPS module on eBay right now (although you have to buy an additional antenna).
At first glance it seems useless for microcontroller projects because it's a mini PCIe card, but as it turns out it has an easily accessible UART port that can be connected to a microcontroller.

Here's the pinout:

The USB device is a standard CDC ACM serial port.

RX/TX pins are a second (independent of USB) UART port running at 9600bps by default.

You can use u-center to modify the module's configuration, for example set the update frequency to 4Hz.

Happy hacking!

USB mass storage bootloader for the Stellaris Launchpad

Edit: prebuilt binaries now available at github!

I wrote a a bootloader for the Stellaris Launchpad (and other Stellaris boards/chips) that acts as a USB mass storage device.
It's inspired by the bootloader found on some NXP LPC microcontrollers.


Just plug in your board while holding SW2, it shows up as a tiny external drive, copy your firmware.bin to it and *bam!* your board has new firmware!
You can also download the current firmware from the drive.

It takes up 16kB of flash memory.
Please test it and report any issues!
Usage instructions at github.

Source code and prebuilt binaries: https://github.com/Emeryth/Stellaris-mass-storage-bootloader