This Internet thing will never catch on.: GPS mini cape for Beaglebone Black

On a whim I bought a Beaglebone Black. Now what? I need more PC's like a hole in the head. So what to do with it? Nothing came to mind until I discovered one day that my home brewed NTP server had failed. Aha! A quick poke around the net revealed this howto. Stand well back folks.

I've been playing with the Ublox NEO-6x series of GPS receiver modules recently. They are super-simple to use and add to any project. They need only power, antenna and a serial port. So with the GPSRX being so small and simple to use a daughterboard or "cape" (why cape? UnderDog is a Beagle and he wears a cape) for the Beaglebone was a natural fit. (

The board consumes only one of the headers

The board sits on top of the BBB drawing power from it via the raw 5V line. I found that I had to increase the current on the 5V PSU that supplied the board so that I could get a reliable GPS lock but otherwise it worked first time. And as you can see below, my Linux terminal prefers it to the other available servers from us.pool.ntp.org

g7ltt@earth:~/Downloads$ ntpq -p
remote refid st t when poll reach delay offset jitter
=====================================================================
*time.g7ltt.com .GPS. 1 u 5 16 377 0.284 0.880 1.543
-tdp-ism01.exped 206.183.22.197 3 u 4 16 377 55.487 -61.764 1.003
+152-ism01.exped 129.6.15.28 2 u 9 64 377 31.547 -69.109 1.229
-upa-ism01.exped 206.183.22.197 3 u 15 64 377 43.276 -68.318 1.557
+810-ism01.exped 128.118.25.12 2 u 6 64 377 38.032 -67.287 1.023