[OpenLayers-Users] link with gps

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Didrik Pinte wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-06-26 at 15:45 +0200, Kenneth Skovhede, GEOGRAF A/S wrote:
>> Its fairly easy.
>>
>> These are the steps:
>>
>> 1. Set up OL map (I assume you have this)
>> 2. Read data from GPS
>> 3. call map.setCenter with the GPS data
>>
>> Step 2 varies, depending on the GPS brand.
>> Usually you can tweak the device to put out NMEA compliant data on a
>> COM port. 
>> NMEA is human readable, and specs can be found online.
>>
>> Step 3 may cause trouble, because you have to interact with a
>> javascript inside a page.
>> On way is to simply host the page in an application, ie. a .Net form,
>> then the access is there.
>>
>> Another way is to create a webservice / micro webserver that returns
>> the current position.
>> A javascript inside the page can then poll the position (via AJAX),
>> and update the center.
>>
>> You may run into trouble if your map is projected into something thats
>> not Lat/Lon compatible.
>> In that case, take a look at the Proj.4 library, avalible for both
>> javascript and regular programming.
>> Regards, Kenneth Skovhede, GEOGRAF A/S
> 
> Hi Kenneth,
> 
> Thank you for your answer.
> 
> I have just found some things for the step 2 : 
> - Garmin seem to provide a closed source plugin with an open source
> javascript library that allows to communicate easily with the gps
> - another closed source application called gpsgate that can interface
> with a lot of gps and expose kind of webserver to it's javascript api. 
> 
> Nothing fully opensource for the moment ;-) There is some potential for
> a new projet.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/gpsd/
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&newwindow=1&q=gpsd+windows

Maybe these will help.

-Steve W