GPS and Portability?

curious george asks: "I've always loved knowing exactly where I am in the world and it's becoming easier with the mainstream application of GPS receivers and other integrated technologies available on the consumer and prosumer market. However, finding those awesome accessories that seamlessly integrate with the laptop, mobile phone, or PDA are incredibly difficult. Does Slashdot know of any gadgets that can add the GPS capabilities found in most new vehicles to the mobile geek? Infrared, Bluetooth, USB, and other methods are abound, but what about compatibility between the Mac, Windows, Linux, and Symbian operating systems?"

Comments

Serial is fine

[m_chan]

Bluetooth is pretty nifty, but it can be hard to get the compatibility you are looking for. Indeed, I am typing this post on my laptop running Fedora Core 2 over a bluetooth connection using GPRS through a mobile phone. However, serial ports and serial cables are reliable, prevalant, and are your best shot at compatibility. A GPS connection is not going to move (relatively) much data over whatever interface you choose. Serial is easy.

I recently received a Garmin Rino 130 as a present. It's pretty nifty. It's hand-held, with a built-in digital compass along with the GPS, and it has a built-in FRS/GMRS radio. Something like 54MB of RAM for maps. There's plenty more stuff in there that I haven't even scratched yet.

I don't really have much recent experience with GPS equipment, but within 15 minutes I had it talking via its included serial cable to my laptop via NMEA protocol, and started plotting my location on freely-downloadable maps with the awesome GPSDrive software.

The process was as easy and about as seamless as I could have imagined for such stuff.

Interfaces - Serial, USB, Bluetooth

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

Incidentally, as far as I can tell so far ALL of Serial, USB, and Bluetooth are "Serial" interfaces: The USB-based GPS units that I've actually looked at (not that there have been many) seem to be Serial units with a Serial-USB adapter integrated into it, and the Bluetooth units seem to work similarly (basically giving you a "wireless serial port"), so for the most part, it should really only be a question of your platform's support for the appropriate type of "serial" adapter. In the case of my Deluo, it's the "USB Prolific 2303 Single Port Serial Driver" in Linux.

From there, whatever software you're using just gets pointed at the "serial port" (/dev/ttyS0, /dev/ttyUSB0, etc.) that the serial, USB, or bluetooth driver makes available and away you go. Or at least, that's how it SHOULD work.

Anybody know where the CompactFlash GPS would show up in the system if I were to, for example, plug it into my linux laptop with a CompactFlash PCMCIA adapter? I've always wondered about that.