Hsinchu, Taiwan, December 23, 2013 — SkyTraq Technology Inc., a leading fabless GNSS positioning technology company, is undertaking a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to explore if there is sufficient interest in applying GPS/GNSS processor technology beyond the standard GPS/GNSS chipset/module solutions, by offering NavSpark, a small, powerful, thumb-sized, 32bit microcontroller development board with GPS/GNSS receiver as onboard peripheral. With price approaching 8bit microcontroller development boards, the GPS/GNSS receiver is effectively provided to users free of charge. They are seeking $27,000 in funding until February 6, 2014
NavSpark features:
• 100MHz 32bit RISC with 16Kbyte I-Cache and 2Kbyte D-Cache
• IEEE-754 Compliant Floating Point Unit
• 1MByte Flash Memory
• 212Kbyte SRAM
• GPS Receiver
• UART x 2
• SPI x 2
• I2C x 1
• 17 Digital I/O (shared with above functional pins)
• 1 Pulse Per Sec Timing Reference with +/-10nsec Accuracy
• Customized Arduino IDE with GPS SDK Seamlessly Integrated
NavSpark-BD model has GPS/Beidou receiver onboard, enabling users to use the latest GPS/Beidou navigation technology just as large smartphone makers are beginning to adopt this new technology. The NavSpark-GL model has GPS/GLONASS receiver onboard, enabling users to use dual-satellite navigation technology, GPS/GLONASS as used in high-end smartphones, in their hardware projects. The NavSpark development board makes the latest global navigation satellite technology easily accessible.
SkyTraq’s 7mm x 7mm QFN56 Venus822 quad-mode GPS/GNSS processor with extended I/O pins is used on NavSpark. Venus822 is designed to simultaneously process 34 GPS / GLONASS / Beidou / Galileo / QZSS / SBAS signals in parallel, thus having much higher computation power and larger memory than conventional 8bit or 32bit microcontrollers. Without using GPS/GNSS function, all the 100MIPS RISC/FPU processing power and 1MByte Flash + 212Kbyte RAM memory capacity is available for user application. When just using GPS-only mode or GPS/GLONASS, GPS/Beidou dual-satellite navigation mode, the remaining MIPS and memory still far exceeds what’s available on similar small, low-cost development boards on the market.
With average price of different model variants plus active antenna in range of $15 ~ $20, NavSpark’s goal is to provide the makers an alternative powerful, small development board with location-sensing capability, and at the same time making latest GPS/Beidou or GPS/GLONASS dual-satellite navigation technology as easily accessible as GPS to the users worldwide.
NavSpark is low-cost enough to leave in small hardware projects. For higher volume projects such as asset tracker, GPS fitness product, sports performance logger, toy quad-copter autopilot …etc., after rapid prototyping using NavSpark, volume usage can later change to lower cost 10mm x 10mm x 1.3mm Venus838FLPx module, a miniaturized LGA version of NavSpark. For applications benefiting from NavSpark’s high processing power and large memory without using GPS/GNSS, volume usage can later change to Venus822 chip to reduce cost.
For further information on NavSpark, and to back the project today, please visit: http://bit.ly/1dBpits
About SkyTraq
Founded in 2005, SkyTraq Technology Inc. develops high-performance chipset and module solutions for the consumer satellite navigation market. Its initial product is GPS centric, now with products covering GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, Galileo, QZSS, and SBAS. For additional information, please visit www.skytraq.com.tw