Constellation is Windows CE application that interprets and displays NMEA data strings from a GPS receiver. 

Constellation is not one of these new flashy moving map GPS applications.  This is because it runs on old Windows CE Handheld PC hardware which have limited processing power and it is written in Microsoft Embedded Visual Basic which is not blindingly fast (or even slightly fast).

What Constellation does do is provide a graphical and text display of NMEA data frames data received from a GPS receiver connected to the serial port.

Constellation was written in 2006.

The hardware that it is written for was manufactured as early as 1998.

Why would anyone waste time doing that?

Four reasons:

• I had two GPS modules sitting on my workbench that really needed to be hooked up.  They had only been sitting there for two years.......
• I had a pile of obsolete Windows CE Handheld PC hardware sitting in the corner of my office.  These machines had all run various versions of software produced in my day job but didn't have much of a future.....
• The development tools for the old hardware are free (if you can find it.... the HP 620LX was a challenge... Embedded Visual Basic doesn't directly support CE 2.0.... anyone remember Embedded  Tools for Visual Studio 5.0 and 6.0.... I had blocked that out too until this project forced me to remember!).
• It looked like fun.

• Discovering trigonometry again.... it has been a lot of years since school and my day job doesn't have much call for calculating distances between lat/long coordinates or drawing compasses.
• Discovering that the old machines can still do something useful (well fun anyway).
• That Embedded Visual Basic while definitely not cool, with assistance from sites like DevBuzz and HPC Factor can do more than you might expect.