If anyone can help me by giving me pointers then it would be helpful, thanks.
Yeah, I just got one myself, I don’t have it fully worked out but I can give you the highlights.
A good thing about the NEO6M is that it uses the same voltage level as the BBB (3.3V), and the BBB’s got enough juice you can power it off of the BBB’s power if you wanted to do that (at least if you are powering using a tablet brick). I pull off of the 1,2,3,4 pins of my BBBW (check the model-specific datasheet first on all of this).
Then you directly connect (I’m assuming that you have your NEO on a breakout board already) to the UART1 TX and RX pins on both reversing them (so your NEO TX is to the Beagle’s RX, and RX to TX…think about how serial works and it should make sense).
The difficult part imo is configuring the P8/9 headers so its set up correctly. Apparently 3 ways to do it: you can use an “overlay”, you can change your uEnv.txt file, or there is a pin-config utility that can do it from shell. Apparently…
Once you get it all set up this way, you should be able to talk/listen to it via serial (I’m planning on using the ttyO1, with an oohhh, not a zero, serial abstraction so I can talk to it with UN*X streams a la stdio and C). A lot of people use python (not much of an expert at that).
I think it said it was set up to send its current NMEA string out the TX pin a few times per second by default.
Remember to attach the included antenna. It might also recommend something called a “back plane” which is just a big stretch of tin foil under it. I just have my antenna taped to my breadboard.
You can write to it (hence the bidirectional serial interface). You use its datasheet to figure out what serial commands it takes to modify its internal registers to increase reporting speed, serial configuration and a whole bunch of things the average hobbyist will never use. However you might want faster sampling so I mention that you can write to it.