Marksmann GPS
Posted: January 25th, 2022, 12:29 am
Since I've been working some odd schedules at the office due to designing and building a new TV studio I decided to pick up a little side project I could work on at night. I got inspired by Rymo's Marksmann GPS build over on the RPF and ordered a few on eBay with the intent of keeping one for my video production systems and giving the others the GPS treatment. Only one in the group worked, so I'll probably just wind up modding them all. The cases are scarred up pretty good where somebody tried to grind out the CSPAN engraving and have lots of little dings from being tossed around in a TV truck for years.
The one that works will be modified similar to how Rymo did his, reutilizing the integrated screen and running everything off a Pi Zero.
My other units unfortunately do not function at all, so their guts are not really useable. It seems to be near impossible to find 5-inch 4:3 LCDs anymore but I did find a 4.3-inch 16:9 screen specifically for the Raspberry Pi system that fit well. I had a spare RPi 4 I was able to use and found that it fit in the space made available by removing the original LCD screen. I trimmed the Tektronix circuit board a bit with my Dremel and used the standoffs included with the RPi LCD to hold everything in place. I still need to mod the original power switch to start and cleanly shut down the RPi.
I have some VHF antennas and PCMCIA cards on their way. The gold-on-black labeling tape arrived over the weekend. Will probably have to 3D print the sun hood as even generic 5-inch 4:3 hoods seem to be rather hard to find now. And the stupid supply chain issues have Raspberry Pi's impossible to find, so that essentially brings the electronics side of the project to a halt for the moment.
The one that works will be modified similar to how Rymo did his, reutilizing the integrated screen and running everything off a Pi Zero.
My other units unfortunately do not function at all, so their guts are not really useable. It seems to be near impossible to find 5-inch 4:3 LCDs anymore but I did find a 4.3-inch 16:9 screen specifically for the Raspberry Pi system that fit well. I had a spare RPi 4 I was able to use and found that it fit in the space made available by removing the original LCD screen. I trimmed the Tektronix circuit board a bit with my Dremel and used the standoffs included with the RPi LCD to hold everything in place. I still need to mod the original power switch to start and cleanly shut down the RPi.
I have some VHF antennas and PCMCIA cards on their way. The gold-on-black labeling tape arrived over the weekend. Will probably have to 3D print the sun hood as even generic 5-inch 4:3 hoods seem to be rather hard to find now. And the stupid supply chain issues have Raspberry Pi's impossible to find, so that essentially brings the electronics side of the project to a halt for the moment.