If your car doesn’t show you the direction you are traveling it would be handy to build this DIY Car Compass. DaAwesomeP built this neat device, most cell phones have this capability but it is nice to have a piece of hardware doing the work in a fixed location. A Pro Mini is used to read in position data from a magnetometer and then output the results on a nice OLED display.
Via: Arduino Forum
“Parts:
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Arduino Pro Mini 328 – 3.3V/8MHz I got the 3.3v version for simplicity of connecting it to the other 3.3v parts (Sparkfun).
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SparkFun Triple Axis Magnetometer Breakout – HMC5883L This compass breakout can be mounted in any orientation (Sparkfun).
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SparkFun Micro OLED Breakout This is the screen form the MicroView, but the Arduino + Screen is cheaper than the MicroView and its programmer (Sparkfun).
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Protoboard It doesn’t matter what you use, but this is what I got (Sparkfun).
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Power Source I just cut the end off a 30-pin 5v car charger that I had. It was useless and lying around. The Arduino can handle an input from 3.3v to 12v DC.
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Thin wire You’ll need this to make jumper connections on the perfboard. My was about 24 AUG. I used both stranded and solid wire for different parts.
- Headers This will make it easy to attach the components to the protoboard.
- Why no accelerometer? An accelerometer would allow for automatic adjustment of orientation and declination angle, but this is mostly intended to be a more permanent thing, and you can learn about how the declination angle works.”
