News and New Products

Stackable receiver enables position tracking

By Warren Webb, Technical Editor -- EDN, 4/28/2008

As transportable embedded systems become commonplace, designers are looking for economical ways to integrate global-positioning equipment to track movements and deter theft. To target these applications, Micro/sys recently released the USB1700, a GPS (global-positioning-system)-receiver board in a form factor one-quarter the size of the PC/104 footprint. The ROHS (restriction-of-hazardous-substances) module provides designers with 12-channel, WAAS (wide-area-augmentation-system)-capable GPS functions for space-sensitive applications. The integrated GPS technology offers fast start-up and high performance in foliage-canopy, multipath, and urban-canyon environments. The board comes with a passive antenna.

The USB1700 physically conforms to a new form factor, which StackableUSB defines. StackableUSB is a fairly recent standard that uses USB communications between a single-board computer and peripheral I/O cards in a stack similar to PC/104. Depending on the design, the CPU card can support 10 peripheral I/O cards—five on the top and five on the bottom—without the use of a hub board. At 1.85×1.78 in., the USB1700 is one-fourth the size of a standard card, resulting in improved cooling and smaller packaging. To accommodate the smaller StackableUSB form factors, the company added a fifth stabilizing hole to the 104-footprint definition. Prices for the basic USB1700 start at $230 (one).