[Qgis-developer] Accessing GPS devices platform independently

[Martin Weis]

Dear QGIS-developers!

I would like to contribute, if I can.

Marco Hugentobler schrieb:
> Wow, that sounds good! Let us know when the plugin is available. I
> could have a look on the attribute problem (as long as the problem is
> in QGIS and not in OGR library).
> 
> I agree with Tim that it would be good to have a class for live GPS
> access in the core library. So probably we can port parts of the
> plugin to C++ later.

I am also interested in a live GPS plugin and had some ideas how to
implement this.

>> On 2009-09-05, at 7:34, Marco Hugentobler <marco at hugis.net> wrote:
>>> I see there are some projects connecting gps devices and QGIS
>>> (QGIS track GPS, Quantum Navigator, QGIS mapper).

I did not understand how to use it, maybe someone can guide me how to
install/test the plugin/navigator (Navigator seems not to compile
against recent QGIS versions)? This might be a good basis :-)

>>> Is there already some NMEA related code?

Just tried to write some code for myself (another project), but then
I had a look into http://nmea.sourceforge.net/, which seems to be a
useful library for this task. So far I only looked at the code and did
not use it. The gpsd implementation is also very sophisticated, at least
the parser is worth looking at. And there is gpsbabel, which might be
handy here.
Platform independent access to serial ports may be implemented using
http://code.google.com/p/qextserialport/ , although the implementation
seems to be a bit crude (doubled code/Classes for win/posix systems).
Got that running (on linux) already...


> Am Samstag, 5. September 2009 15.26:00 schrieb bob @ SHAW:
>> Hi Marco: A few months ago I started work on a GPS plugin that 
>> would work on Windows since gpsd doesn't work there. I used Martin

Maybe you can achieve gpsd-similar results under WIN using
http://gpsfeed.sourceforge.net/ , which is a small tcl program that
listens to a serial port and provides the nmea data over a given port,
just like gpsd does with:
http://localhost:2947/?r

Maybe I could help with this sooner or later, but first I need to get a
dev system properly set up and read all the dev-infos in the wiki.
Please contact me, if you have suggestions, how I could help.

Thanks,
Martin Weis

>> D's trackGPS plugin as a starting point. I've got it working over a
>> serial port to the point where it is actively displaying the
>> location on the map canvas. I got stuck at the point where I was
>> going to save the track to a Shape file because I couldn't get the
>> Shape writer to set up the attributes exactly the way that I had
>> programmed it to (i.e. when a text attribute of a certain size was
>> requested the attribute actually appeared in the file at some
>> default size). This plugin is not as advanced as some that are
>> under development, it  only displays the position with various
>> options and will save the track to a Shape file (when that part is
>> finished) but it does work on Windows now. I plan to finish work on
>> it this week and release it and I will be asking for help to get
>> the Shape file attribute problem resolved. Any help that you or
>> others could lend to this effort would be appreciated.
>> 
>> Bob Bruce
>> 
>> Sent from my iPhone
>> 
>> On 2009-09-05, at 7:34, Marco Hugentobler <marco at hugis.net> wrote:
>>> Hi devs
>>> 
>>> Is there a way to access the data from a GPS device (serial port
>>> or USB port) in a platform independent way? From what I have
>>> read, gpsd can be used on Linux but not on other platforms.
>>> 
>>> Is it necessary to directly parse the NMEA 0183 protocol on
>>> windows? I see there are some projects connecting gps devices and
>>> QGIS (QGIS track GPS, Quantum Navigator, QGIS mapper). Is there
>>> already some NMEA related code?


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