Build a Magnetic Compass with Arduino

Making your own digital compass many have seemed out of reach  - however nothing could be further from the truth thanks to the inexpensive HMC5883L  digital compass board and the omnipresent Arduino development board.

The folks at ArduMotive have demosntrated how to make a neat digital compass solution that can be used for all sorts of directional tasks:

With a little work you can display the compass output as the heading or direction, and this project does both with the use of an inexpensive LCD. A quick demonstration of the resulting compass is shown in the video below:

There are some caveats with respect to using the compass however these are explained well - so to get started,  head over to the project's Instructable page. And if you're interested in doing this yourself, PMD Way can help you out with the required parts, such as:

• HMC5883 compass modules
• 5110-style graphic LCDs
• huge range of Arduino and compatible boards
• and much more!