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Two Ways To Use GPS With Linux
An anonymous reader writes "Whether you're wardriving, vacationing or building a Car PC, a Global Positioning System is a handy tool. Interacting with your GPS via your PC makes for an even better GPS experience. As a Linux user, GPS/PC integration can be somewhat sketchy. Vendors don't write software and drivers for Linux; it's probably safe to assume that the good folks over at Garmin would say something along the lines of "Lih-what?". Have no fear! Using your GPS with Linux isn't impossible! Check out this review over at LinuxForumsDOTorg of two fairly robust GPS navigation programs for Linux."
I use gpsdrive without any driver issues. The real problem is the availability of maps.
Linux is perhaps the most stable operating system currently on the market. In fact, in several studies that I've seen, Linux as an embedded system outperforms and crashes less often than dedicated software on traditional GPS systems.
I've recently gotten Garmin GPSMan 60CS as a gift and so far I was unable to get any Linux programs to talk to it (over the USB cable that came with it). Did anybody have any success with getting Linux talk to any Garmin GPS units over USB?
Vendors don't write software and drivers for Linux
Who cares about software and drivers. Open protocols and open standards, that's what we need!
bash$
Yes, but if you were a corporation, you'd establish a failure ratio, then, regarding the guarantee that a dedicated system manufacturer would offer, you'd probably go for this one anyway.
Why ?
Imagine you are the owner of a supertanker fleet and they all use GPS to navigate.
Now, if one of these sinks at Valdez of in Bretagne, you'd have a hard time explaining to a judge how responsible you were not if you went for a self hacked system.
The same could apply for trekkers who could get lost because of a dysfunction.
BTW, I had a Zaurus and its battery life is just too low to make it OK for a GPS enabled trek.
And despite this, I'd love tosee Linux go mainstream but this'll have to be distributed through a commercial channel otherwise it won't be able to finance itself.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Us ham types've been doing GPS navigatin not only of our own vehicles, but others as well for over 12 years now! I use a package called 'Xastir' and an on the air protocol called APRS.
Basicly, take a GPS receiver and a laptop (Not just linux, xastir will run on Windows too), a TNC and a VHF radio - use pretty much any map you'd care to use (local or online), current weather information, satallite imagry, NWS alerts, warnings, etc, etc, etc... See your track - find your way, see forest fires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes....
The only limit is imagination
Just wanna check on someone? Use your web browser and visit Findu - plug in their callsign and see where they're at.
And no, you don't need a ham license to play along. Just to feed data into the world wide Information System.
Kinda neat to zoom in on 'the old country' and watch my firends in the UK on thier way to work as I'm get'n ready to call it a day, then keyboard to keyboard messaging with 'em along the way.....
And no air time fees
Senior NCO in the fight against entropy. I've seen things, man. Things no one should have to see.....
Listen, I'm as big of a Linux fan as anyone, but trusting my coding (or even worse, someone else's) to work on my specific build out in the middle of a fog when it's failure means being hopelessly stranded... That's a pretty frightening thought. At least if something is released commercially and it fails like that, you can sue once (if?) you get back to shore.
Most GPS receivers will deliver their signals in NMEA format, which is an accepted standard. Most of the USB units even only contain a pl2303 chip or another form of USB2Serial driver and work just fine. I bought mine on eBay, just plugged it in, and hotplug did most of the work. It appeared as a new USB serial port, so I could gpsdrive without any problems.
Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh.
Slightly related, someone recently posted to the Full Disclosure mailing list, with a guide for how to get the Pharos GPS-360 (as sold in the "Microsoft Streets & Trips 2005 with GPS locator" package) working under linux. Might be useful to some people
Um, Does your GPS output NMEA? Read the owners manual. If you read the article, then you would know both programs use NMEA from the GPS on a serial port.
If your GPS provides it then Ok it should work, If it doesn't, then your milage may vary.
The truth shall set you free!
I would agree with not putting Linux on a GPS device, even if it was capable. Embedded systems are fairly hard to hack for a good reason: If you mess it up, it will be a serious problem.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, however, there is.
I believe the success of GPS has always been the fact that it can reliably give you your position at any point in time.
Somebody mod this guy +1 Insightful!
I am a starving student and all these GPS receivers seem out of reach (even the cheapest seems to be over 150$). Is it tough to build one on your own? Anyone with relevant experience? Any pointers would be appreciated.
gpsd: serve up realtime GPS data
s /html57_us er/v.in.garmin.html
http://gpsd.berlios.de
gpstrans: download/upload Garmin data
http://gpstrans.sourceforge.net
gpsbabel: up/download & convert GPS data
http://gpsbabel.sourceforge.net
v.in.garmin + GRASS GIS 5.7: download GPS directly into serious mapping & analysis software
http://grass.ibiblio.org/grass57/manual
http://grass.ibiblio.org
have fun, don't get lost.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
I don't want to torpedo the purpose of this whole article, but Linux isn't as far out in the cold as you might think. Most GPS programs out there use the NMEA protocol which is handled over a common serial port. The article poster seems to imply that Linux is left out in terms of drivers, but the fact is that most GPS units support the NMEA protocol. That includes Garmin, Magellan and others. If you have a common DB9 serial connector and the right cable, you can get any number of GPS units to work with any number of programs.
That being said, what is troubling is the "any number of programs" that I mentioned above. There really is not a large community of developers working on consumer mapping applications. If you look hard enough, you may stumble across some gems here and there, but for the most part the Linux scene is noticably lacking.
Tuxmobil's Page is a good place to start looking at different apps.
Hmmm...
Yeah, and I carry a copy of Bowditch, a recent set of charts, an RB sight, and a sextant for when the fool thing breaks... and I know how to use these tools, too.
This past summer, a friend of mine took it into his head to build a caseless PC.
This plan was to have two modes; a mode for work (IE: throwing it in his backpack), and a mode for play (mounting it on an RC car he built himself).
He began finished the latter while I watched him, utilizing his own hacked together power setup to provide rechargable battery power to the device for a period of time he has yet to test fully. He then proceeded to install Linux on a 128 MB CF card, using an IDECF converter [I was amazed it existed, but there you go], and a few small utilities for run. A 500 MHz processor powered it.
Now, the relevant part of this is the RC car it was on. He wanted to control the car using the motherboard mounted on its back. He wrote a simple program to send pulses along a parallel converter of his own design to the various wheels, as they responded to pulse frequency by operating specific ways...pretty standard.
Then, he wanted to use a GPS to make it drive around the campus. He wrote his own software for the GPS device another friend of ours provided, NMEA-0182 with a few vendor extensions, IIRC. The device sent over serial, and it was a fairly simple bit of work to make it interpret the coordinates properly...the hard part was mapping the area. =)
The point of all that is, good GPS devices usually use a standard output interface, and protocol. And it is, honestly, not that hard to write your own program to interface with it. I still have the source code to the program he wrote...it's easily under 1000 lines, and possibly under 500.
So, if you'd like to use a GPS device to steer your projects...write your own software. =)
It's only an insult if it's not true.
I hand-built serial cables using plugs I got from this guy (Elsewhere on that site there's links to folks all over the world selling the same plugs for a range of different GPS receivers). Apparently even the tiny little Garmin Geko 201 and Geko 301 (but not the 101 model) also speak serial - and they're tiny cute little things they are!!!
My little eTrex has a menu with a whole bunch of different 'languages' that it will speak (and/or receive) via the serial port. According to the manual (warning: pdf) (page 45) it speaks NMEA 0183, a bunch of proprietary Garmin stuff and a couple of flavours suitable for differential work. I know from fiddling with mine that it also speaks a 'plain text' (they're all plain text, but this one is more so) format that is quite human readable and probably quite easily parseable with some perl.
Another imporant point about GPS and Linux (*nix in general is time). GPS requires incredibly accurate time to operate, so by implication GPS receivers make excellent clocks. Last time I checked xntp had support for NMEA (GPS) as a time source.
A quick freshmeat (if 'google' is a verb, then surely 'freshmeat' can be one too!) will tell you that GPS on *nix is nothing new!!! (Not all of those returns are gps nav related, but there's a lot of stuff to parse gps sentences, moving maps, program receivers, all kinds of goodies!
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
OLEX is a nice piece of commercial mapping software that runs under Linux, and to my knowledge there is a lot of very positive feedback from the local fisherman in the area where I work, Scotland, West Highlands.
Our diversity is our strength
Just how much money do the Linux users here thing they contribute to the bottom line at Garmin or Magellan? The offerings for Linux (Linspire, etc) ready for the consumer are noticeably lacking. It's going to stay that way for quite a while. When someone says "there is no software for Linux" invariably thousands of geeks on here (I use that term in the fondest manner) will say "oh I just hooked up my transmogrifier to the digital mitzoplexer and then filtered that through Google. Simple!". Well it's not simple folks. Until you realize that the consumers (you know, those folks paying for things) drive demand, things will not change.
A lot of folks here see a good idea, take it, write their own spaghetti code and tailor it to how they want it and then call it good. The folks in Redmond see a good idea, dumb it up to the least common denominator and wham . your Grandmother has one in her Lincoln Continental. See the difference? There's money in developing code that's "good enough" so long as you address it to your market.
I've seen some pretty cool work with in-car PCs and some using Linux. These are packaged with the consumer in mind, even if they are not quire ready yet. That's what's going to catch on. Just because there are open standards does not mean you all need to write your own. That's the surest way to obscurity.
it's probably safe to assume that the good folks over at Garmin would say something along the lines of "Lih-what?".
This may be the case, however, they are very open with the interface/communications protocols for their GPS's - If you go here you can download documents detailing the protocols in a platform neutral format, meaning that anyone with just a little programming experience can easily make programs to interface with their GPS's, on any platform, Linux included. To be quite honest, I can't think of another hardware vendor, that is so open with the specs. Usually, Companies require you to jump through hoops (NDA agreements/ etc) to get hold of this information, or have to resort to reverse engineering, etc. And, if you can't/dont want to program, then there's a few projects already made for you on sourceforge!
To sum up, Don't knock Garmin, They might not produce Linux drivers, but at the same time, they do go out of their way to make it easy for others to do so should they want to.
GIS-Knoppix (http://www.sourcepole.com/gis-knoppix/) comes with a set of pre-installed GIS (Geographical Info Systems) software and utilities including GPSDrive.o s&os=Linux is an excellent resource fo GIS, GPS and related tools including many for Linux &c.
A.
http://www.freegis.org/browse.en.html?category=
Difficult and confusing to install? Check!
"Although Roadmap is not the easiest to configure and install..."
Lack of features found in commercial grade applications? Check!
"It would be nice if Roadmap could compute trips and give you step-by-step voice directions, but it doesn't have that feature..."
Broken stuff in the app that confuses users? Check!
"There appears to be support for starting and stopping gpsd from within the program when it loads, but it doesn't seem to work with the either the pre-compiled binaries or the source."
Now just throw in spotty or nonexistant support, and morphing into total Abandonware once the author graduates from college, and we have a real Linux app here!