Interfacing PIC microcontroller with GPS module | mikroC Projects

This PIC project shows how to interface PIC16F887 microcontroller with GPS module in order to receive data from satellites where the GPS module used in this project is u-blox NEO-6M (other modules also should work). With the NEO-6M GPS module we can measure position (latitude and longitude), altitude, time (UTC), date, speed and some other data. The compiler used in this project is mikroElektronika mikroC PRO for PIC.   —  GPS: Global Positioning System  —

In this project I’ll send information of latitude, longitude, altitude, time (UTC), date, speed and course serially (using serial port) to the laptop (PC). Data are sent to the laptop after receiving it from the GPS module. The laptop displays all data with serial monitor software such as Windows hyper terminal, Arduino IDE serial monitor, mikroElektronika USART Terminal (Tools –> USART Terminal or shortly   Ctrl + T) …

The NEO-6M GPS module which I’m using is similar to the one shown below:

NEO-6M GPS module

Generally the NEO-6M GPS module has 4 pins: VCC (3.3V or 5V), RX, TX and GND. It uses serial communication (UART protocol) to communicate with the microcontroller where RX/TX pins are for receiving/transmitting data from/to the microcontroller.

GPS Library for mikroC PRO for PIC compiler:
To simplify this project I wrote a small library for GPS modules, this library decodes (parses) GPS NMEA sentences (the GPS module serially sends NMEA sentences to the MCU, these sentences contain all data we need, but they need to be decoded). This library extracts all data from 2 sentences: RMC ($GPRMC) and GGA ($GPGGA).  —  NMEA: National Marine Electronics Association  —

The GPS library decodes the RMC sentence which gives latitude, longitude, time, date, speed and course. It also decodes the GGA sentence in order to get altitude and number of satellites used by the module.
$GPRMC: Recommended minimum specific GPS/Transit data
$GPGGA: Global Positioning System Fix Data

GPS Library for mikroC PRO for PIC compiler can be downloaded from the link below, its full name is “GPS_mikroc.c“:
mikroC GPS Library download

after the download, add the library file (GPS_mikroc.c) to project folder.

Hardware Required:

  • PIC16F887 microcontroller
  • NEO-6M GPS module
  • USB to serial converter (such as FT232RL)
  • 5V source
  • Breadboard
  • Jumper wires

NEO-6M GPS module interfacing with PIC16F887 MCU circuit:
The following image shows the circuit diagram of the project.

PIC16F887 NEO-6M GPS module interfacing circuit

(All grounded terminals are connected together)

The NEO-6M GPS module board has 4 pins connected as follows:
GND (Ground) pin connected to circuit GND
TX pin goes to PIC16F887 RX (RC7) pin (pin #26)
RX pin is not connected (there is no need to send data from the microcontroller to the GPS module)
VCC pin goes to circuit +5V pin.

To be able to send data from the microcontroller to the laptop we need a USB-to-Serial converter module. In this project I used the FT232RL module (the main component is FT232RL chip from FTDI), other modules can be used including the Arduino boards.
The GND pin of the USB-to-Serial converter is connected to circuit ground and RX pin is connected to PIC16F887 TX (RC6) pin (pin #25).

In this project the PIC16F887 microcontroller runs with its internal oscillator @ 8 MHz, MCLR pin is configured as an input pin.

NEO-6M GPS module interfacing with PIC16F887 C code:
The following C code is for mikroC PRO for PIC compiler.

With the code below we can get the following data from the NEO-6M GPS module:
latitude, longitude, altitude, time (UTC), date , speed, course and number of satellites in use. The image below shows my result (I used mikroElektronika USART terminal):

NEO-6M GPS module mikroC output

The function void byte_to_str(unsigned short nub, char *str) converts a byte of 2 digits (0 – 99) into string of 3 characters (with string terminator ‘\0’), if the byte number is less than 10 the first character will be 0. For example 7 becomes “07”.

The function void float_to_str(float f_number, char *f_str, short size) converts a float number into string where f_number is the float number we want to convert, f_str is the string we want to store data in and size is number of digits after the floating point.

Full mikroC code:

The simulation of this project with Proteus should give a result similar to the one shown in the following video where PIC16F877A microcontroller is used:

Related Project:
GPS Clock with PIC microcontroller and NEO-6M module | mikroC Projects


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