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
- Plug in a USB gps receiver, let's see, here's a DeLorme Earthmate LT40
- /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
Position
Time
Python integration
I want a short python script here...
