Once upon a time, external bluetooth GPS receivers used to be A Thing. These days, they're no longer cheap as chips, nor are they particularly small.

As my dad would say "I could build that out of plywood!" So here we are. Using a Heltec wifi-kit-32 (ESP32 + SSD1306 OLED) and a no-name Ublox NEO-6M breakout board I built one. The OLED display provides visual indication of fix status, and the build takes advantage of the lithium charger onboard for wireless operation. The firmware also allows the device to be used as a generic usb GPS.

A couple of handy features:

• the device will pick a device name based on its mac address
• $PUBX,00 fix messages are enabled to improve compatibility with Bluetooth GNSS
• Airborne <2g dynamics mode is enabled to improve operation in flight

• relay ubx mode
• wifi captive portal
• wifi relay mode