Bought a real cheap (well reputed) GPS, Holux M-1200. It was a little more expensive than M-1000 but I decided the smaller form factor was worth the little extra buck.
The goal is ultimately to be able to use it to geotag my pictures taken with the D90. Getting Maemomapper to work too on my N800 is definitely a subgoal (but not the thing that drove the purchase).
From scriblings on the next I expected that I might need a special USB cable to get it to work with the D90 (or any other device over USB for that matter), but the description was not clean on that when I purchased it, and the site did not have that extra accessory available any way, so I started without.
Right, then manual clearly stated that a special fabricated usb cable was necessary to get GPS out of the USB port (otherwise just used for charging the battery if a standard USB cable). I cannot find ANY good explanation why they make the requirement of a specially crafted cable other than to make an extra buck on the cable, in which case, in my book, they are starting to build up to being evil. Anyway…
First up, I could not connect maemo mapper to it. maemo mapper refused me to use the menus to enter a mac address for the usb device (or scan for it). I installed gpsd but that did not work out for me either.
So I turned to my laptop (T61p, I really like it, plays 90% ok with mandriva — but, note to self, do not upgrade a kernel if the stuff you care for already works, sigh … I will never learn).
The bluetooth on the t61p had had varying degrees of stability (software upgrades, see note to self above). But currently it is working alright. Googled a bit around and found there good resources: using bluetooth gps @ ubuntuforum, google cache version of a ubuntu india forum on gprs and bluetooth phones. I had never need the GPRS info in the ubuntu india link, the mandriva wizards had just worked for me there, but it’s nice to find a good resource and it has some good CLIs on bluetooth.
Now to some CLIs from the above resources:
[root@eraest ~]# hcitool scan
Scanning …
00:12:D2:5B:9D:FD /)/ E70
00:10:C6:4C:26:17 d505-0
00:19:4F:A4:BE:BA KNB N800
[root@eraest ~]#
(note my holux is missing, its tag is “HOLUX_M-1200″, I belive it is missing from the scan because I am already connected to it (see next couple of steps).
[root@eraest ~]# vi /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf
# note I have a rfcomm0 which is pairing to my phone
# that pairing uses channel 1, so channel is not to be uniquerfcomm1 {
bind yes;
device 00:1B:C1:02:54:BB;
### we can find the channel by issuing
### $ sdptool browse your-gps-mac-address
channel 1;
comment “HOLUX_M-1200″;
}
Note I got the channel info from the following command:
[root@eraest ~]# sdptool browse 00:1B:C1:02:54:BB
Browsing 00:1B:C1:02:54:BB …
Service Name: SPP slave
Service RecHandle: 0×10000
Service Class ID List:
“Serial Port” (0×1101)
Protocol Descriptor List:
“L2CAP” (0×0100)
“RFCOMM” (0×0003)
Channel: 1
Language Base Attr List:
code_ISO639: 0×656e
encoding: 0×6a
base_offset: 0×100
I had to /etc/init.d/bluetooth restart (believe mandriva renamed to service from bluez-utils as is quoted in one of the resources – nice user friendly touch, slighty techy unfriendly). An alternative to restarting bluetooth may be use of
[root@eraest ~]# rfcomm –help
but I am just guessing (and keeping the reference for next time I am in trouble).
Next step is to try and find out where I am … so I have to noted the applicationname gpsdrive and urpmi’d it – nice, I could see the coordinates and the (not so nice maps) showed that I definitely was pretty close to where I expected it.
I probably just have to repeat the above exercise on the N800 and I will be set to go with maps.
As for the cable, I am trying to order it (my internet provider seems to have goofed up receiving from my smtp server, but perhaps it’s just something I did and forgot about somewhere.
Update:
Other resources worth on gps: