Using Your Eggfinder
To use your Eggfinder effectively, you’ll need:
• An Eggfinder TX board (to send the GPS data from your rocket)
• An Eggfinder RX board (to receive the signal from the Eggfinder TX)
• A computer/tablet with a USB port to connect the Eggfinder RX board
• Some kind of software to record and/or interpret the data from the Eggfinder RX board
• Some way of figuring out where you are so you can get to your rocket’s location
The Eggfinder RX board uses a standard USB Type A plug, compatible with virtually every
laptop PC. Tablets with USB ports usually have a USB “Mini” or “Micro” jack, so if you want
to use a tablet with the cable you may have to get an adapter; they can be readily found at
electronics retailers.
You will also need an appropriate USB-Serial driver for your platform. The Eggfinder cable
uses a Prolific PL2303HX USB-Serial chip, the drivers can be found at:
http://prolificusa.com/pl-2303hx-drivers/
Prolific offers serial-mode drivers for Windows, MacOS, Linux, and an SDK for Android;
there may be some pre-built Android drivers available.
Note that they currently do not offer a Windows 8 driver; however, we have heard that older
Windows Vista drivers (pre-Windows 7) will work with Windows 8.
Whatever software you use to connect to your Eggfinder RX receiver, you will need to find the
COM port that is used to communicate, and set the data format to:
9600 baud, 8 bits, 1 stop bit, no parity, no flow control (or, no handshaking)
GPS Software
The software that you use can be as simple as a terminal program that you use to simply
download the NMEA data stream (using the “last received” $GPGGA record to give you the
coordinates of your rocket’s landing spot), or as sophisticated as a GPS mapping program that
shows you in real-time where your rocket is going, with a satellite map overlay. The
requirement is that it must be able to handle NMEA-formatted GPS input from a serial port. In
the case of a serial terminal program, it’s just going to spit it out on the screen; it’s up to you to
interpret the data. Most people will want to use a mapping program, it makes life much easier.
Some programs that we’ve tried include:
Serial terminal programs
PuTTY
Hyperterm
