Gpsd

Where

gpsd home: http://gpsd.berlios.de/

Current version: 2.94

The Mac port: version 2.38 http://gpsd.darwinports.com/

My Mac: MacBookPro running 10.6.3 (Snow Leopard).

What and why

gpsd is a service that listens to one or more gps receivers and makes the received data available over a network connection. It understands a wide variety of binary protocols.

The reason to run it on a Mac laptop is to make the signal available to programs needing time and location services in a way that is flexible and device independent.

I use virtual machines, so I should be able to let a program running on any virtual machine connect to the gpsd host running on the Mac.

Receivers

All the receivers I have currently are covered:

• DeLorme Earthmate
• Garmin
• NMEA
• SiRF
• Trimble TSIP
• UBX

How

There is no need to do anything special, at version 2.94 it builds out of the box on Snow Leopard.

unpack tarball
./configure
make
sudo make install

Starting it up

1. Plug in a USB gps receiver, let's see, here's a DeLorme Earthmate LT40
2. /usr/local/gpsd

What you get

Besides the daemon "gpsd", of course...

In /usr/local/bin, you will find

• lcdgps
• gpxlogger
• gpspipe
• gpsmon
• gpsdecode
• gpsctl
• cgps

Python integration

I want a short python script here...