[geeks] GPS and Mac and maybe bluetooth?

[Shawn Wallbridge]

I have had quite a bit of time playing with GPS on my mac lately. 
Pretty much any NMEA compatible Serial based device will work with a 
USB-> Serial adapter.

I am currently borrowing a friends Socket Bluetooth GPS receiver. It is 
amazingly easy to set up. All you do is pair with the device (standard 
Bluetooth practice), then open the Bluetooth Serial Utility and create 
a Serial connection over Bluetooth to the device (when you do this, it 
creates a /dev/tty.XXXXX entry for the device (eg, /dev/tty.Socket in 
my case)). Once you have that done, you have the equivalent serial port 
for use with any software.

As for software, the first thing you will probably want is gpsd, it's a 
daemon that sits there and talks t the gps. Its a simple compile (or 
install via fink). Lots of applications can/will only use gpsds for 
data, so it is good to have around. The next application you want is 
GPSDrive, which is in the Fink unstable tree. compile that and you will 
love it. The project (on freshmeat) has screenshots. It will do most 
things you want to do with you GPS unit (at least it does for me). It 
uses gpds and will start it for you. I fire up GPSDrive, and have it 
start gpsd, then I fire up kismac which connects to gpsd as well.

My friend uses his 12" powerbook to do this....

http://www.wpgwifi.com

I used my powerbook and his gps unit to make this the other night on my 
flight back from Vancouver....

http://www.wallbridge.net/van_wpg.gif

If you have any more questions, feel free to ask, if I don't know the 
answer, I will try to figure it out for you.

shawn


On 27-Feb-04, at 1:54 PM, Dan Duncan wrote:

> Does anyone have experience using a GPS with a Mac,
> preferably OS X?  Mostly I'm finding software, of which there
> seems to be plenty.  This implies to me there are GPS units that
> work with a Mac, but I'm having trouble determining which units do.
>
> Also, of the many bluetooth-enabled GPS units that seem to exist,
> why does only one of them (Fortuna GPSmart) actually have a screen
> so it can be used as a handheld GPS? IE, why don't more handheld GPS
> units support bluetooth?
>
> I'm in the market for a new GPS, and I'd like it to interface
> with my upcoming laptop (iBook), and if it would do so without
> a cable (bluetooth) then I could also use it with my cellphone
> or my desktop.
>
> My old GPS is probably going to become my ntp source.
>
> -DanD
>
> -- 
> #  Dan Duncan (kd4igw)  dand at pcisys.net  http://pcisys.net/~dand
> # Never pet a burning dog.
> _______________________________________________
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