Bluetooth Gps And Tangogps

[Spirit]

Not my actual location, tangoGPS shows that with a nice big blue dot.

I use a "blumax Bluetooth GPS-4013 Receiver", costs about 45€.


Install gpsd. The gpsd in the unstable repo is too new for tangogps ( http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.org/msg761792.html ) , http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/feeds/2008/ipk/glibc/armv7a/base/gpsd_2.38-r0.1_armv7a.ipk works. If tangoGPS says "connection to gpsd SUCCEEDED" but does not get the location, this is the cause.

You also might want to install the handy gps-utils, but that is not required.


Turn on the mouse. In the Pandora's Bluetooth tool set the pin to "0000" (as in the blumax manual). Click on the mouse in the list, turn it off, press Forward and quickly turn it on again. This seems to work for me, otherwise it failed pairing.

/etc/init.d/gpsd stop, until someone posts how to properly configure gpsd. I did not try yet.
hcitool scan shows you the mouse's bluetooth address (MAC).
(hcitool inq should show something)
sudo l2ping bluetooth-address lets you ping the unit, according to http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/bluetooth-guide.xml this means pairing was successful.
sudo rfcomm bind /dev/rfcomm0 bluetooth-address
cat /dev/rfcomm0 should now show you the NMEA feed of the gps unit
gpsd -Nn -D 3 /dev/rfcomm0 can be used for debugging gpsd, if all is fine ctrl-c and run the next command:
gpsd /dev/rfcomm0

(Next time you only need sudo rfcomm bind /dev/rfcomm0 bluetooth-address and gpsd /dev/rfcomm0)

Now you should be able to use tangoGPS. Be aware that by default it stores downloaded map tiles in your home directory (that is on the NAND by default!), you want to change that to an SD card or /tmp


Thanks to wejp for his support.



Navit crashed with out-of-memory when I supplied it with OSM data for my hometown.

 

[cbox]

Awesome. I'm very interested in this for my Pandora.

 

[Spirit]

Viking seems to work well.
gpsdrive is too big for the screen, at least per default configuration.

http://relet.net/frog/archives/68 is great to import GPX, Geocaching.com pocket queries or LOC files to tangoGPS.

 

[HaCo]

This is simply awesome!

Thanks for the tutorial, now I only need a Pandora (I already have blumax BT GPS reciever )

 

[zapman]

could you please elaborate how you installed tangoGPS?

I installed all tangoGPS dependencies by hand (onto the NAND) and got some collisions with already existing files. As I force-overwrote them tangoGPS worked but after doing so with ScummVM as well, the nubs on quake 2 + 3 didn't work properly anymore. So I guess I shouldn't have done the force-overwrite??

I reflashed the Pandora OS and the nubs are working again. This time I would like to make a clean install of tangoGPS..

thx for your help!

(PS: If someone is familiar with making .pnd's building one with tangoGPS would be great!)

 

[Spirit]

I did not have to overwrite any files. "sudo opkg install tangogps" was enough. Do you remember what kind of files were overwritten and by which dependencies?

(Quake 3 never worked properly for me, Q2 does though.)

 

[zapman]

I did not have to overwrite any files. "sudo opkg install tangogps" was enough. Do you remember what kind of files were overwritten and by which dependencies?

(Quake 3 never worked properly for me, Q2 does though.)

You are right! Somehow I installed all dependencies (found in the angström repo) manually last time..

This time I just did

'sudo opkg update' and
'sudo opkg install tangogps'

and all went smoothly and automatically (! )

TangoGPS starts nicely, now I just have to figure out how to connect to my USB GPS Mouse (Navilock SirfStar III) via GPSD...

EDIT:
I tried
'gpsd stop' and afterwards
'gpsd -Nn -D3 /dev/ttyUSB0'

without success. The reply is:

'gpsd: launching (Version 2.91)'
'gpsd: Can't bind to port gpsd'

hm..

 

[Spirit]

EDIT:
I tried
'gpsd stop' and afterwards
'gpsd -Nn -D3 /dev/ttyUSB0'

without success. The reply is:

'gpsd: launching (Version 2.91)'
'gpsd: Can't bind to port gpsd'

hm..

gpsd was probably started by root so you cannot simply stop it. Try "sudo /etc/init.d/gpsd stop". Use "ps aux | grep gpsd" to check if it is still running. Be aware that 2.91 will NOT work with tangogps, see my post about that older version.

 

[zapman]

EDIT:
I tried
'gpsd stop' and afterwards
'gpsd -Nn -D3 /dev/ttyUSB0'

without success. The reply is:

'gpsd: launching (Version 2.91)'
'gpsd: Can't bind to port gpsd'

hm..

gpsd was probably started by root so you cannot simply stop it. Try "sudo /etc/init.d/gpsd stop". Use "ps aux | grep gpsd" to check if it is still running. Be aware that 2.91 will NOT work with tangogps, see my post about that older version.

yes, thanks! But I didn't get that far, I'm still trying to get to "connection to gpsd SUCCEEDED" and than downgrade to the other version. Trying to find the GPS device with 'dmesg'..

Speaking of which... how do I downgrade if I have already installed the newer version?

 

[Spirit]

opkg install --force-downgrade /path/to/gpsd_2.38-r0.1_armv7a.ipk

Good luck!

 

[zapman]

yes, I finally did it!!! Hurrraayyy!

after downgrading and rebooting I had to kill the gpsd daemon first:


'sudo /etc/init.d/gpsd stop'

Than, I restarted it like this:

'sudo gpsd -N -n -D 2 /dev/ttyUSB0'

Running tangoGPS, it finally found my GPS mouse and pinpointed my location correctly!

Thx alot Spirit!! You gave me the right hints and motivation to do this! Will update the 'how-to' on the german forum soon, started a thread there some time ago.. hopefully some others can benefit from this as well.

Thanks again!

EDIT:
is there a good way to download and store opensteetmap files onta a SD card? [A: Found out using tangoGPS ist actually really good for this: just change the cache directory of tangoGPS to some dir on the SD card, change the view of tangoGPS to the desired are, right click --> map download --> choose max zoom levels. Will see how that turns out.. more than 25,000 tiles for the area of Munich with zoomlevel +6; is there a problem with a FAT formatted SD card and that many files in dozens of folders? ->Efficiency?? Downloading takes ages, this much I can tell already..]

 

[Spirit]

Awesome!

You can run gpsd as normal user. And since it works fine, a simple "gpsd /dev/ttyUSB0" will be enough. The switches were just to quickly check if it works.


Yeah, Tangogps is great to download OSM. It is not nice to the server(s) though as it seems to fetch them as fast as it can. Also batch download from the servers is not encouraged: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_usage_policy
You are welcome to batch download Tiles@Home from http://tah.openstreetmap.org/Browse/slippy/ though. But hey, I used tangogps for Hamburg (up to level 17) too.

To fetch T@H for Hamburg I hacked together some crude shell wget bash loops, I have not tested the outcome though.

FAT should be fine since the tiles are in subdirectories.

For updating the tiles there are http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/TangoGPS#Updating_pre-downloaded_maps which I have not tried though.

 

[zapman]

Yeah, Tangogps is great to download OSM. It is not nice to the server(s) though as it seems to fetch them as fast as it can. Also batch download from the servers is not encouraged: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_usage_policy

doh! I think I got banned already because I downloaded the Munich area. :unsure: Well, just donated 30€, OSM is really worth supporting!

 

[zapman]

omg, I just realized the tiles are acutally png files!
Isn't it possibel to get some vector data and render the map on the pandora? Must be muchmuch more efficient concerning file size!! Or is there a good reason pngs are used?

 

[Spirit]

Yeah.

PNGs are much easier for the software. It does not have to care about how to render. Also it is much lighter on the CPU.

We need to get Navit to work to use the raw data. It's not nearly as easy (or plain) as tangogps but also has routing features. For me it always crashed because it tried to allocate 3GB of memory even if I just gave it hamburg.osm to eat.

It's just a matter of time until someone fixes it. I am very much looking forward to it. I should make a proper bug report.

 

[WizardStan]

I loaded the entire planet OSM dump in Navit on my beagleboard, and it was slick as rain.

 

[Spirit]

Uh, I was dumb and did not cat file.osm | maptool output.bin. Heh!

Got rid of the 3GB memory allocation at the start now but it still crashes with "cannot access memory" as soon as I tap the screen.

 

[zapman]

nice to know that some people who speak linux are fiddling with Navit! Please let me (us) know if you've tackled it.. would really need some help with Navit.. :rolleyes:

 

[WizardStan]

nice to know that some people who speak linux are fiddling with Navit! Please let me (us) know if you've tackled it.. would really need some help with Navit.. :rolleyes:

Basically how it will look on the Pandora
This is the search window
I believe I may have had the resolution wrong when I created these. Doesn't matter, it still works. This is also on a BeagleBoard, which should be close enough for it to work directly on the Pandora in exactly the same way.
The only thing I didn't try was with a GPS, since I don't own one.

 

[gruso]

Ooh, I'm late to this thread. Great to see this stuff happening!