Equipment

We have 3 sets of equipment.

Set One

IBM Thinkpad (large)
Compaq Wi-Fi card
Earthmate GPS (yellow) with USB cable
Power adapter & cord

Set Two

Dell Latitude
Compaq Wi-Fi card
Garmin GPS III Plus (black) with serial cable
Power adapter & cord

Set Three

IBM Thinkpad (small)
SMC Wi-Fi card
Etrex GPS (green)
Belkin serial-to-USB converter with two cables
Power adapter & cord

The equipment you'll get has three components.

1. The laptop

You know what a laptop is.

All the laptops run Windows XP and have been configured so you don't need a password to log on. Each laptop also comes with various power cables. The power of your average laptop is under 2 hours, so keep the laptop plugged in unless you're in the car.

2. The Wifi card

A wifi card is a wireless network adapter that plugs into an open PCMCIA slot in a laptop. I will show you how this works during training. Here is an example of what one looks like:

The side that is not blue, or that does not light up, is the side that plugs into the computer.

3. The GPS unit

A GPS unit is a nifty device that syncs up with satellites to determine the Global Positioning (i.e. latitude and longitude) of a location. Here is a picture of a GPS unit:

We have three GPS units:

Earthmate (yellow). Does not have display, turns on automatically, attaches directly to the ThinkPad with USB cable.
Garmin GPS III Plus. Press the red light button to turn on. Has display. Attaches directly to the Dell with serial cable.
Etrex. Press the bottom right button to turn on, the top right button to begin scanning for satellites. Attaches to serial-to-USB converter. This just means that you plug the GPS unit into a separate cable, and then plug that into the laptop. We will go over this in training.

Setup:

Here is a trashy picture of how the equipment goes together:

Note that only one laptop requires the serial-to-USB converter.

university of washington | department of communication | intro to new media