[Arm-netbook] Help Taiwanese open-source GPS hardware a bit

[Pierre-Hugues Husson]

Excerpts from Paul Sokolovsky's message of 2013-12-23 04:41:56 +0000:
> Hello,
> 
> Sorry for potential spam.
> 
> There's a campaign at Indiegogo to develop a board with GPS MCU which
> would allow to run user programs alongside the GPS stack. It's unclear
> how open the GPS stack itself would be, but even if it will be a binary
> blob, it's still great progress comparing to current GPS chipsets. As
> an extra, MCU feature SPARC architecture, which alone worth to be
> present in every geek's personal computing museums. And early bird
> price starts at pretty low for 32bit "maker" scene figure of $15.
It's 20k minimum units, so I wouldn't call it cheap, by itself.
And I can't really see why it is better than currently existing GPS chips.
Well, it's better (and/or worse depending on the point of view), because it is
running on the main processor (better integration, easier for someone to
write own GPS stack (if GPS peripheral documentation exists !)).
Anyway, if nothing is specified, assumes it's closed.
And current situation for GPS chips, is that they are using standard
NMEA/AT commands, while using this GPS chip would make the protocol
specific to this chip.

Still, this board has many advantages, like they say, it's a rather high
end micro-controller, cheap (assuming they hit 30k$) compared to arduino,
with arduino (IDE and shields) compatibility.