On Wednesday 19 May 2010 12:45:04 Mark Johnson wrote:
> Hi All,
> I'm looking at getting a GPS dongle (or just a compact USB-attached GPS)
> to have a play with I was wondering if anyone would mind sharing
> experiences and recommendations with the devices?
> The main system it'll be used on is an EeePC 901 running Ubuntu Netbook
> Edition, so any experiences with those would be an extra bonus :-)
>
> Cheers
> Mark
>
Pretty much anything will work. The USB dongles all manifest themselves as USB
to Serial devices which then sen NMEA 0183 data to the computer. Check the
OpenPilot project for source code on this.
If you are feeling adventurous you can have a play with Bluetooth GPS. Same
deal, though. It comes in over bluetooth RFCOMM, is "mapped" to a serial
device, from which you read the same data.
Some are better than others, but if you're just investigating then there
probably isn't much in it. The more sats you track, the better the fix (and
time to aquire). I would avoid the really cheap units (I have had one which
stopped working).
Let me know if you want any further info,
Tim B.
--
OpenPilot - Open-source Marine Chart Plotter
Lead Developer
http://openpilot.engineering.selfip.org
