The NEO-6 is a neat and affordable little GPS positioning chip with a few features which go unused in my other GPS tracker boards. One of these features includes a direct USB connection to the chip, allowing it to be used with a computer.

The circuit is quite simple, consisting of only the ublox chip, a few resistors, and a voltage regulator in order to power the 3.3v chip from the 5v USB line.

My circuit is based around the diagram in the uBlox hardware integration manual (page 12)

The PCB design is less than optimal, but this was really just an experiment into the use of USB.

Result! It works perfectly!

I was not sure at first if it would show up as a USB serial port, or some other kind of input device. However it appears in device manager as a “uBlox 6 GPS Receiver (COM11)” making it nice and easy to program with.

I can also confirm it works out of the box with the Raspberry Pi, accessible via PySerial, making it perfect for the SSDV Pi payload I am also working on (more to follow shortly).