Building the Haptic Appointment Manager

Overview

The Haptic Appointment Manager device was designed to manage all appointments of an individual where the time of arrival is ensured as well as the right location.

Explanation

To maintain awareness of the absolute and rotational position, the system utilizes a GPS receiver and a compass. The system provides guidance to the user in his appointment by vibrating in the direction of the next waypoint due to the interfacing with a calendar of time stamped waypoints.

The serial data communication between the GPS receiver and the microcontroller is made possible using a RS232 standard. The voltage levels are not much regarded since the receiver communicates directly with microcontroller. The transmission of data is done by sending out a start bit, followed by data, and finally a stop bit. Unless there is a new start bit, no new data is transmitted.

The position, velocity, and time sent out by the GPS receiver comprise the NMEA format included in the data. A 4800 baud is the data transmission NMEA standard. A sentence that first contains a prefix represents each line of data which defines the device then a character sequence follows which defines the sentence contents.