My little C program is shaping up nicely. It's not so little any more – it's just over 3kloc (three thousand lines of code, for all you non-geeks). It's been a terrific learning exercise for me, just what I needed for “reentry” into the world of low-level programming.
When I quit working on code yesterday afternoon, I had a problem that was vexing me: unreliable communications (via serial port) with the GPS, using the U-Blox proprietary UBX protocol. Fixed in my head was the notion that the problem was caused by the fact that the GPS was transmitting both UBX and NMEA data on the same wire. I imagined that the GPS was behaving stupidly, interleaving the bytes from each protocol. This morning while I was taking my morning shower, an alternative theory came to me – one that would be much simpler to fix. It's amazing how often I have solved (or at least made progress on) problems while taking a shower. Something about that activity is conducive to insights. Anyway, the alternative theory was simply that when I was sending a UBX command the host computer's UART receiver was out of sync with the data stream being transmitted by the GPS. This would only be an issue if the receiver had been fed a stream of NMEA data before trying to read a UBX message. I made a quick change to my code to force synchronization before any UBX operation, and poof! – just like that my reliability problem disappeared.
Obviously I need to take more showers! :)
