The ZED-F9R GPS Breakout from SparkFun Electronics is a GNSS OEM Board that has been designed for concurrent reception of GPS, Glonass, Galileo and BeiDou signals with ~0.2-meter accuracy. This high-precision, sensor fusion GPS board takes advantage of u-blox's Automotive Dead Reckoning (ADR) technology. It provides a highly accurate and continuous position by fusing a 3D IMU sensor, wheel ticks, a vehicle dynamics model, correction data, and GNSS measurements.
This board features a 184-channel u-blox F9 engine GNSS receiver that can only operate as a rover, so the user will need to connect to a base station. The combination of GNSS and integrated 3D sensor measurements on the ZED-F9R provides accurate, real-time positioning rates of up to 30 Hz.
Compared to other GPS modules, this breakout maximizes position accuracy in dense cities or covered areas. Even under poor signal conditions, continuous positioning is provided in urban environments and is also available during complete signal loss (e.g. short tunnels and parking garages). The ZED-F9R is the ultimate solution for autonomous robotic applications that require accurate positioning under challenging conditions.
Additionally, this u-blox receiver supports I2C (u-blox calls this display data channel) which makes it perfect for the Qwiic compatibility. Utilizing the handy Qwiic system, no soldering is required to connect it to the rest of the system. However, the module still has broken out 0.1"-spaced pins in case the user prefers to use a breadboard.
U-blox based GPS products are configurable using the popular, but dense, windows program called u-center. Plenty of different functions can be configured on the ZED-F9R: baud rates, update rates, geofencing, spoofing detection, external interrupts, SBAS/D-GPS, etc. All of this can be done within the SparkFun Arduino Library. The SparkFun ZED-F9R GPS Breakout is also equipped with an on-board rechargeable battery that provides power to the RTC on the ZED-F9R. This reduces the time-to-first fix from a cold start (~24s) to a hot start (~2s). The battery will maintain RTC and GNSS orbit data without being connected to power for plenty of time. This module supports NMEA, UBX, and RTCM protocols over UART or I2C interfaces.
