amiga-news.de - Minipeg: Germany's smallest Pegasos computer/GPS support included

07.Sep.2004
Carsten Siegner (ANF) Minipeg: Germany's smallest Pegasos computer/GPS support included
The Minipeg is a Pegasos I/G3 board built into a custom small case of stable V2A stainless steel. The case measures 34 x 9 x 19 cm, the steel has a thickness of 1 mm. The second component is a 7" TFT monitor which power is supplied by the Minipeg. The monitor has VGA input and a remote control. Keyboard and mouse are wireless. Furthermore, a fanless Radeon 7000 graphics card and a 2.5" hard disk are used.

The Minipeg is powered either by a small power supply, a car battery or some nickel-cadmium accumulator batteries. The power consumption is 24 Watt at 12 Volt. Instead of a normal ATX power supply, a fanless DC/DC converter with an ATX mainboard cable is used. The converter works with 10-30 Volt direct voltage.

Also integrated into the Minipeg is a GPS receiver, for which a custom navigation software has been written. Thus, the Minipeg can be used in a car or possibly even at hiking.

The software currently uses a map of Germany scaled 1:600,000 and operates in two modi: as a viewer for road maps and for GPS navigation. The first modus allows to scroll or zoom the map. In the second modus, the map display is directly linked with the data coming from the GPS receiver. After switching into the GPS modus, the map is centered to the current GPS position once the first data are received from the GPS module.

Alternatively and independent of the chosen modus, it's possible at any time to display the GPS information in a transparent window.

The projection of the reticule of longitude and latitude degrees on the current map unfortunately doesn't deliver an exact positioning. The aberration on this map may be up to 10 km depending on the direction. The work needed for a correct calculation of the position on this map would not be justified by the cost-value ratio. But the inaccuracy gets moderated by using a GNS database.

A GNS database contains coordinates linked to the corresponding places. These GNS databases do exist for all countries and can be downloaded from Internet. The accuracy of this database for Germany is about one square kilometer. These places are displayed also by the software when the map gets centered to the current position of when these data are displayed in a separate window. This way, the user always knows where on the map he's currently located. (snx)

[News message: 07. Sep. 2004, 15:36] [Comments: 0]
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