Re: Universal power supply for PCs, setting voltage

On Tue, 4/1/2025 10:40 AM, micky wrote:

 
I only wanted that to charge my phone.  Had a hotel and used the
computer there.
 
But when I do foreign travel, even if I have rented a room, it can be
too far to drive back at night just to return the next morning, so i
often sleep in the car, and use the laptop before sleeping and in the
morning.  (ne time I used while driving it to find a particular stream
in a "park" and I got interested in having GPS for the laptop, but none
of them had iirc very good reviews and now I can't remmeber why the
phone wasn't good enough anyhow.) 
 
But I will make sure any rental car in the future has a cigarette
lighter. or power port and young'ns call them.

I have a GPS here from Adafruit that seems to work OK.
It can pick up a few birds while sitting in the house and
sitting on a window ledge inside. (It can see seven satellites,
but only two have "green" signals and full signal strength
inside the house.)

It can scan some number of channels, and once it has acquired
a set, keep those working channels operational, and get a result.
It might deliver four messages per second, serially. You can
program the baud rate.

The trouble with hobby designs, is they're not packaged for
trips (too many wires). A commercial one will be a blob and a single cable.
But we don't know how technically sophisticated those are.

And as the standards for these slowly change, eventually
you might need a new one, for some whizzy quality improvement.
For navigation, you don't need bomb-site accuracy.

The Adafruit one has a PPS signal (Pulse Per Second) and
the edge of that signal is fairly precisely aligned to the
official time. It's hard to get that edge into the computer
without degrading the precision. That should be able to do a
better time alignment, than the Windows w32time over-the-network
update.

   Paul