Arctiq GPS

My name is Jyot Patel. I'm 14 years old. I moved to the US from Canada last year, I was born in India, and I spend almost all of my free time tinkering with hardware and building stupidly overengineered side projects.

A little while ago I got really, really annoyed at consumer GPS units. The entire market is basically a monopoly. All of the options are overpriced, locked down, and missing really obvious features. Your phone works great until you drive 10 minutes outside of any city, and then it dies. So I decided to build a better one.

This is a completely standalone offline handheld GPS that works anywhere on earth, in any situation. It's 5x2.75 inches, roughly the size of a regular smartphone, fits perfectly in any pocket. No subscription, no account, no cell service required, ever.

It does all the standard stuff: really fast offline routing, custom POIs, and scenic route options. But it also has one feature I have never seen on any commercial GPS: it will map all cell service dead zones along your route ahead of time, and tell you exactly how long you will be out of coverage.

Right now it runs for 3-5 hours on a single charge, and considerably longer if you enable the lower power modes.

I designed the entire system from scratch, and put a huge amount of work into getting the power circuitry right because the last thing you want is your only lifeline back home to fail:

BQ25895 charging IC for proper rapid charging

MAX17048 fuel gauge for actually accurate battery percentage over I2C

TPS62825 and TPS61088 for power conversion and MAX16054 for proper hardware power switching

At the core is a Raspberry Pi CM4 that runs all of the routing and application logic. For GPS I'm using a NEO M9N, paired with a 28dB high gain active antenna. It gets a fix faster, and works in much weaker signal than any Garmin I have tested it against.

I also added a SPH0645 microphone, MAX98357 amplifier and speaker, and a 5 inch capacitive touchscreen connected over DSI. And the feature I am most proud of: a magnetic USB expansion port on the bottom. You can snap on additional modules: LTE modems, cameras, survey sensors, literally anything anyone wants to build. This isn't just a GPS. It's a general purpose offline handheld multitool.

I'm building the first revision of this for the OpenSauce hackathon. But this is much more than just a hackathon project. I genuinely think the consumer GPS market is broken, and there is no good affordable option for people that just want to be able to navigate offline, whenever they need to. Long term I want to make this entire project fully open source, and offer it to anyone for a fraction of the price of the current commercial options. Obviously this is a bit more expensive as it is a prototype and mainly because I could not get my hands on any SOC's that fit my requirements.

That's why I'm reaching out to you. I would be incredibly grateful if PCBWay would support me on this project. This has been 3 months of work after school and on weekends, and I'm so close to having a finished working unit.

I am excited for this opportunity I am being offered and we can offer everyone an easier way to navigate for less.