Re: [CentOS] USB GPS

2010-02-14 Thread Pasi Kärkkäinen
On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 12:29:25AM -0800, John R Pierce wrote:
 Mathieu Baudier wrote:
  Anyone ever used the iGPS-500 under CentOS 5?  Any recommendations on a
  USB-based GPS that just works?
  
 
  I use the Garmin GPSMAP 60CSx on CentOS.
  This is a very good device (but more for offroad activities).

 
 there's two generic families of GPS's, simple antenna+radio-only units 
 which just report position over USB (or on older ones, rs232 serial), 
 and fancy handheld units that have mapping and tracking and all kinda 
 bells and whistles such as the various Garmin units
 
 most folks who want a GPS to connect to a computer are probably more 
 interested in the simple kind, as they want to use the computer for any 
 mapping etc.  most all simple GPS's speak in NMEA, which just transmits 
 a constant stream of simple ascii 'sentences' with the current location 
 and some metadata.   fancy GPS's like the garmins can speak either 
 simple NMEA or their own Garmin protocol  which supports mapping, 
 waypoints, etc
 
 typical NMEA output is...
 
 $GPGGA,123519,4807.038,N,01131.000,E,1,08,0.9,545.4,M,46.9,M,,*47
 
 (12:35:19 UTC, 48 deg. 07.038' N, 11 deg 31.000' E latitude), quality 1, 8 
 sats, etcetc
 
 
 most any NMEA USB simple GPS should work, they all emulate a USB serial 
 port on the PC side, and just spew their NMEA stream over this 'serial' 
 port.  for instance, this 
 http://www.amazon.com/GlobalSat-BU-353-Waterproof-USB-Receiver/dp/B000PKX2KA  
 which uses thee excellent SIRF GPS chip, uses a Prolific PL2303 
 USB-serial adapter chip, which I'm pretty sure is easily supported on 
 linux (havent tested it, hwoever)
 

PL2303 USB-serial adapters work for me on Linux.. I'm mainly using them
to configure switches/routers or occanional serial console dumping.

I think I have some Belkin branded PL2303 based usb-serial adapter.

-- Pasi

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Re: [CentOS] USB GPS

2010-02-12 Thread Mathieu Baudier
 Anyone ever used the iGPS-500 under CentOS 5?  Any recommendations on a
 USB-based GPS that just works?

I use the Garmin GPSMAP 60CSx on CentOS.
This is a very good device (but more for offroad activities).

When you connect the USB cable it is identified as a /dev/ttyUSB0
device that you can use with GPSBabel.
You need to give the proper permissions for your user on this device
(I had an udev rule for Fedora, but on CentOS I did not yet too time
to set it up again).

From the GPS unit itself you can activate an 'USB mass storage' mode
which will make the internal SD card appear as an USB mass storage
(like an USB stick).
This is very handy if you want to retrieve automatically generated
track files in GPX format or update the maps (although I recommend
using a card reader for that: much much faster).

A bit OT but still making sense in this answer: you may be interested
by the excellent community developed maps of OpenStreetMap
(http://www.openstreetmap.org/ , licenses and production mechanisms
similar to Wikipedia), which can be downloaded in Garmin format:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin/Download (or the
Garmin maps can be generated using
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Mkgmap)

Most of the above probably applies to all other recent Garmin devices
but you should double check.

You can also have a look at the GPS review from OpenStreetMap users here:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/GPS_Reviews
(but you won't find much information on supported OSes, esp. CentOS)
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Re: [CentOS] USB GPS

2010-02-12 Thread John R Pierce
Mathieu Baudier wrote:
 Anyone ever used the iGPS-500 under CentOS 5?  Any recommendations on a
 USB-based GPS that just works?
 

 I use the Garmin GPSMAP 60CSx on CentOS.
 This is a very good device (but more for offroad activities).
   

there's two generic families of GPS's, simple antenna+radio-only units 
which just report position over USB (or on older ones, rs232 serial), 
and fancy handheld units that have mapping and tracking and all kinda 
bells and whistles such as the various Garmin units

most folks who want a GPS to connect to a computer are probably more 
interested in the simple kind, as they want to use the computer for any 
mapping etc.  most all simple GPS's speak in NMEA, which just transmits 
a constant stream of simple ascii 'sentences' with the current location 
and some metadata.   fancy GPS's like the garmins can speak either 
simple NMEA or their own Garmin protocol  which supports mapping, 
waypoints, etc

typical NMEA output is...

$GPGGA,123519,4807.038,N,01131.000,E,1,08,0.9,545.4,M,46.9,M,,*47

(12:35:19 UTC, 48 deg. 07.038' N, 11 deg 31.000' E latitude), quality 1, 8 
sats, etcetc


most any NMEA USB simple GPS should work, they all emulate a USB serial 
port on the PC side, and just spew their NMEA stream over this 'serial' 
port.  for instance, this 
http://www.amazon.com/GlobalSat-BU-353-Waterproof-USB-Receiver/dp/B000PKX2KA  
which uses thee excellent SIRF GPS chip, uses a Prolific PL2303 
USB-serial adapter chip, which I'm pretty sure is easily supported on 
linux (havent tested it, hwoever)



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Re: [CentOS] USB GPS

2010-02-12 Thread Michael A. Peters
John R Pierce wrote:
 Mathieu Baudier wrote:
 Anyone ever used the iGPS-500 under CentOS 5?  Any recommendations on a
 USB-based GPS that just works?
 
 I use the Garmin GPSMAP 60CSx on CentOS.
 This is a very good device (but more for offroad activities).
   
 
 there's two generic families of GPS's, simple antenna+radio-only units 
 which just report position over USB (or on older ones, rs232 serial), 
 and fancy handheld units that have mapping and tracking and all kinda 
 bells and whistles such as the various Garmin units
 
 most folks who want a GPS to connect to a computer are probably more 
 interested in the simple kind, as they want to use the computer for any 
 mapping etc.

Guess I'm not most.
I use my GPS to collect data on reptiles and amphibians, dump the data 
to gpx, pass it through http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/elevation to fix 
the elevation (which can sometimes be considerably off in the unit, 
especially with tree cover), and provide georeference data when I submit 
the data to the nafha database.

I don't do any mapping with the computer, unless you count finding spots 
that look interesting in google earth and uploading them to the unit for 
me to then find out in the field.

Lot of people just like me, too.
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[CentOS] USB GPS

2010-02-11 Thread Ray Van Dolson
Anyone ever used the iGPS-500 under CentOS 5?  Any recommendations on a
USB-based GPS that just works?

Ray
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Re: [CentOS] USB GPS

2010-02-11 Thread Michael A. Peters
Ray Van Dolson wrote:
 Anyone ever used the iGPS-500 under CentOS 5?  Any recommendations on a
 USB-based GPS that just works?
 

I do not have personal experience but I hear the Garmin models work 
well. I have a serial port Garmin model that works well with gpsbabel, 
and I believe the setup for USB is similar.

http://www.gpsbabel.org/os/Linux_Hotplug.html

has instructions for fedora - I'm guessing the fc{5,6,7,8} instructions 
are what would work in CentOS.
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