ESP32 GNSS field¶
A portable GNSS field node you wire yourself — antenna to the sky, fix quality and position on a bright little TFT.
The finished node — a clear-sky 3D fix drives the panel green, sats and HDOP climbing, lat/lon locked in.
Classic ESP32 with a CH340 bridge — the brain of the field node.
Story¶
This started as a parts pile: a classic ESP32 (CH340), an ATGM336H GPS+BDS module, and a 240×240 ST7789. The goal was never a survey rover or a cloud pipeline — just a local field node on Ubuntu you can follow phase by phase, until outdoors you get a 3D fix and the panel goes green.
v1 bring-up runs through Phase 7. Each phase stays a frozen snapshot so you can replay the exact path; later extras (SoftAP, microSD log, PPS, NTRIP) land as new folders, never rewrites of old ones.
A learning demo, not a survey instrument
This is a bench/field project to learn the receiver → quality → display pipeline. Consumer GNSS without corrections is metre-class at best — fine for learning, not for marking property lines.
The shape of it — ESP32 talks to the GNSS over UART and the TFT over SPI. Pin-level wiring is on the Hardware page.
Start here¶
Runs on Ubuntu. Follow the phases in order, one checkpoint at a time.
| Doc | Role |
|---|---|
| Prerequisites | Install the tools — assume nothing |
| Hardware | Parts, pin map, wiring |
| Firmware | Per-phase firmware/<nn>-…/ folders |
| Phase 0 → 7 | The bring-up walkthrough, one checkpoint at a time |
| Lab log | Bench scoreboard — wins and failures |