'Grounds are just magical'

So sayeth the EE. After being shown the data sheet for the h bridge, reworking a common ground to the arduino, the motors spring to life!

A quick bench test and the robot hurtled itself onto the floor to the end of its usb cable tether.

I've coded up some simple menus and added some way point code a la ardupilot. Can't wait to see if I can seek a point autonomously.

End game approaching fast...

So after a spring break trip to Kansas and some work stuff I'm back in the saddle. Minutes before we left I was able to verify that my coordinates from the gps unit were good.

After I realized that the output was in degrees/decimal minutes, not degrees/minutes/seconds I was able to plot my exact position from inside my duplex! Google maps even put me on the correct side of the street - hooo raaay!

With that revelation I'm back to hacking up some code to get the motors to do something.
Additionally I found a really cool uav project - ArduPilot to rip apart. Hopefully with some simplification (I don't need pitch/altitude) I can save some serious time.

RTM

So I finally broke down and started to look for the data sheet for my gps unit. Before I even opened the link on the Spark Fun site I saw that the default baud rate was 38400.

Wah?

Well there is my problem! Setting this correctly in the arduino code fixed the ascii soup issue right up. Now if I can get lat and lon that places me outside China I'd be nearly back to where I was.

Well bummer, still can't get useful strings from the gps module. I now wonder if I have fried something in wiring it up to the other components. First saw this sort of stuff after receiving data from the blue smirf. Tried wired connections, swapping baud rates and ports, even hosts - no dice. Serial output from the arduino seems ok. Only the data that originates from the gps unit is wonky. Hmmm wish I had a second gps unit.... Wonder if I could isolate the problem if I took a shifter board to push output via a different com port / hyperterminal session to the uart on the arduino. Oooh ooooh I bet I could wire up the gps unit to a shifter board to read the raw output, or better yet go and install the software provided by the manufacturer to test and configure the unit!