Fake GPS Challenge

OK, so my NXT GPS Receiver was a fake,... an April Fool's joke. :-)

But can you figure out how it works? See the Fake GPS Receiver challenge. The first three people who can explain how it works get a free copy of nxtprograms.com on CD! Email the link shown in the challenge instead of commenting here if you think you know how and want to explain it. I may post some hints in the comments for this post here if necessary.

Comments

Lol, wow... I had no idea it was fake. I'll have to try the program.

-Jonathan
Mike said…
But how will we know who the first 3 people really are since all the gmail users out there will be using the custom time feature (also released on April 1st):-) http://mail.google.com/mail/help/customtime/index.html
Anonymous said…
I'm also going to try the program.

Too bad it is a fake.
Andy said…
The one thing I really don't get is how you managed to make it download and play the startup sound with no sound block in the program :S So what I think is that you somehow tricked the compiler to download the sound block anyway. And to see the sound block you have to hit the "Display System Files" button too see it, unlike when you use a soundblock. How did you actually do that? :-P

-Andy
Unknown said…
It took me a few hours to figure this out. I was looking at it yesterday and I thought that maybe you had created your own block with LabView and disguised it to look like a built in block. But the solution is not quite so devious as that.

You have a great website!
Dave Parker said…
Congratulations to Gordon Buchanan, Patrick Dynes, and Rong F. Lee, who where the first three people to email me a complete explanation of how the GPS program works! (not counting fellow TheNXTStep blogger Brian Davis who also cracked it quickly).

I added a couple of general "debugging" hints to the program section of the project (http://www.nxtprograms.com/fake_GPS/steps.html#Program), which you might also find useful for other programming problems you run into, and I still have two more CDs to give away if anyone else wants to take a crack at it.

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