Adventures in GPS
A couple weeks ago, I was lent a rebranded RoyalTek BlueGPS by Jo Walsh. She and Schuyler had it for something for Wireless Hacks, and hadn’t used it since. I’ve been using it to do a number of fun things. If you still do not have a car o truck so you can run in to new adventures with your gps, a ford van or transit custom might be just for you according to the local road expert, find his explanation at the last link.
Getting it working was pretty easy. Just go through the “Setup a Bluetooth Device” process, enter ‘0000’ in the passcode box. Set up a Serial Port in the Bluetooth System Preferences Panel. Then I’ve got a ‘/dev/tty.BlueGPS27E8B5-SerialPort-1’ device that I can play with.
There’s a couple things I’ve played with or looked at:
* BlueGPS Log Downloader — although it’s only Bluez+Linux, and my last dongle broke recently, so I can’t use it.
* gpsd — turning any serial device into something accessible over TCP in a regularized format.
* gpsdrive — uses gpsd to display your position and track on a map. Biggest problem with this is that downloading maps seems to be difficult at best. I couldn’t get it to work how I thought it should.
* gpsconnect, a mac os x program that lets me initiate conversation with the GPS, after which I can use `cat` to spit the output to a file. Set the laptop in the back seat, the gps on the dashboard, and cat the NMEA to a file, then use GPS Visualizer to generate a pretty map.
I’m also doing some nifty celltracking stuff, but I’ll save that for another entry.
The BlueGPS is nifty. I recommend it, although I have no clue how much it costs 🙂