[Qgis-developer] Accessing GPS devices platform independently

[Marco Hugentobler]

Hi all

> I think the result from hackfest was that we surely want real time GPS
> tracking functionality in core library, but I don't remember anyone
> volunteering to implement it. So we would be very happy to see any
> patch that adds this feature.

Does someone already work on this?

If not, I can do it, because I need this functionality pretty soon. The idea 
was to port the gps related parts of the qgis-mapper plugin (gather plugin) 
and ev. parts of Bobs plugin to C++ (with QextSerial instead of the python 
serial classes).

Regards,
Marco

Am Dienstag, 10. November 2009 13.23:04 schrieb Martin Dobias:
> On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 3:21 PM, Martin Weis
> 
> <martin.weis.newsadress at gmx.de> wrote:
> >>> 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 :-)
> 
> Right Quantu Navigator app used to work only with old versions of QGIS
> and currently I'm not planning to do any updates to it. But it
> features only a gps emulator, no tracking from a real device.
> QGIS mapper has its gps backend written in python, so that would mean
> porting it to c++ (shouldn't be a big deal).
> Never tried trackgps plugin, but AFAIK it uses the code from qgis mapper.
> 
> >>>> 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...
> 
> NMEA parsing is relatively simple so instead of using some external
> library in C it might be better to write one C++ class that would do
> it... Regarding serial port communication, I've used QextSerialPort by
> myself and seems to be a good choice.
> 
> >> 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
> 
> My idea is that we should support NMEA input generically on all
> platforms, additionally with gpsd support to enable use with some
> devices that don't send NMEA. Never tried gpsfeed so not sure what the
> results would be...
> 
> > 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.
> 
> I think the result from hackfest was that we surely want real time GPS
> tracking functionality in core library, but I don't remember anyone
> volunteering to implement it. So we would be very happy to see any
> patch that adds this feature.
> 
> Regards
> Martin
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> 

-- 
Dr. Marco Hugentobler
HUGIS - GIS programming and consulting
Webereistrasse 66
CH-8134 Adliswil
marco at hugis.net
http://homepage.hispeed.ch/hugis
Technical Advisor QGIS Project Steering Committee