August 12, 2020

GY-NEO6MV2 NEO-6M GPS

Adafruit is selling this for $30. They have it on a breakout board for $40. The breakout is currently out of stock. I would buy the bare module, but the pads are on 1mm centers and I am too lazy to fuss around point to point soldering. The breakout came back in stock quickly and I bought one. I had mine in hand 8-7-2020. It is the v3 board with PPS and datalogging. The datasheet calls it a FGPMMOPA6H standalone module. It is about the size of a quarter with an antenna mounted on top. It is a 66 channel unit, runs off of 3.3 volts. It handles the GNSS satellite set. It has pads for an external antenna.

My unit

I soldered on the header pins and the battery clip. I installed a CR1216 because I had them on hand, it fits nicely under the clip and will work just fine.

I appreciate a number of things about this unit. The onboard regulator that allows it to be run from 5 volts or 3.3 is nice. The availability of a connector for an external antenna. The large easily replaceable battery. And last of all, Adafruit supplied the breakaway header. Thanks.

Pinout

It is intended to be connected to a system with a 3.3 volt uart.

Vin should be power to this unit, from 3.3 to 5 volts.
3.3 is regulated power out, up to 100 mA is available.
Vbat is an alternate way to hook up a battery if you don't want to install a coin cell. I won't use this.

EN is an enable, it is pulled up so the unit will run, you can pull it down if you want to power it down.
Fix is the same as the red LED. It pulses at 1 Hz if there is no fix. When you have a fix, it will pulse high for 200 ms every 15 seconds. Not terribly useful for a microcontroller.
PPS pulses high for 50-100 ms every second at 3.3 volts.

First use

I power the unit from regulated 3.3 volts from a portable supply using a lithium ion battery recovered from a laptop.

It took about a minute to get a fix the first time. After that it seems essentially instantaneous.

Amazingly, it does not lose the fix when I bring it inside my metal roofed workshop. And if I unplug it, then get it started again inside my workshop, it gets a fix in about 5 seconds. This makes it a much better performer than the inexpensive Ublox NEO-6M units I have, which is not terribly surprising.

I also have a Sparkfun SAM-M8Q, which is based on the Ublox M8. I claims similar sensitivity and also gets lock in 5 seconds or so inside my workshop.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Electronics pages / tom@mmto.org