NXT Fake GPS Receiver

Fun Projects for your LEGO^® MINDSTORMS^® NXT!

Fake GPS Receiver

Building:	(none)
Program:

This project was designed as an April Fool's Joke. It is just a program for your NXT (no building) that pretends to be a GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver that uses the NXT to calculate your position (latitude and longitude) by receiving signals from GPS satellites via the NXT's Bluetooth radio receiver. But the whole thing is fake. And furthermore, the NXT-G program (block organization) is designed to look convincing and make it difficult to determine how the fake part works.

So this project might give you two programming challenges. First, for you NXT-G programming whizzes out there, can you figure out how the fake program works? Can you explain everything that you see on the screen given the contents of the program? See the Program section for some hints.

Second, perhaps this idea will give you some ideas for other interesting fake programs you could think up yourself that might be fun to trick your friends with, such as a fake Lie Detector. See the Challenges section at the end of the building instructions for some ideas.

To make things even more confusing, and to help trick people that have experience with computers, the program pretends to "reboot" the NXT under a different operating system, which then runs the GPS application. This is fake too, and is just a diversion to make the trick more complicated...

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