Sheng Ye's Project: GPS on iPhone/iPod Touch
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
This project was my undergraduate 4th year design project in the University of Toronto.
It was finished by a team of two members, Hao Wang and me, under the supervision of
Prof. Baochun Li. It was finished in April 2009, much earilier than Apple/TomTom or Google started to
offer turn-by-turn navigations on their phones. The project's technical aspects earned an A from
Prof. Li, and the overall project with our reports and presentations earned an A- from our
administrator Mr. Gillett.
Executive Summary
- This project involves building a GPS navigation system running on
iPhone/iPod Touch. The final design involves the utilization of a GPS chip, an interface circuit,
a charging circuit, a GPS chip driver, and a piece of GUI and navigation software on iPhone/iPod
Touch. With this design, the system is able to receive GPS signals, show the current coordinate
and speed at current location, display the location on Google Maps, update the location when the
system is moving, navigate routes from current location to destination, and charge the system using
a 12V external power source. After sufficient testing, the system has shown to achieve all the
requirements and well performs on all the objectives within the limits of all the constraints.
While there remain many details to be improved and optimized, the project is concluded to be successful.
Group Highlights
- Our project could be divided into two main areas: software and hardware.
The software tasks include setting up the development environment, implementation of the driver,
implementation of the navigation program on the iPhone and the integration at the end. The hardware
tasks include implementation of the charging circuit, adjusting the GPS chip and creating interface
circuit. Hao is mostly responsible for the implementation of the software and Sheng worked on the
hardware side. Sheng also implemented the decoder program and helped with the research on Google Map API.
Background and Motivation
Project Achievements
System Overview
Navigation Software Design
GPS Chip Driver Design
GPS Chip/iPhone Interface Circuit Design
Charging Circuit Design
Future Improvement
- Localize map
- Implement turn-by-turn voice direction
- Improve usability and reliability
- Add Internet based features such as Traffic, points of interest, commercials based on current location...
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