[SOLVED] Developing GPS app on N900 - how to emulate GPS from NMEA log file?
 

Hi there,

I want to test GPS (liblocation based) software on N900 without physically testing it in the field. The only way I know to achieve that is to use an external bluetooth GPS receiver that would pass dummy data. I have tried several programs for that (SkyLab GPS Simulator for Windows XP, Franson GPSGate for Windows XP and for PocketPC on HTC Touch HD, various GPS emulation J2ME apps like VGPS on Samusung Corby).

Almost every of those resulted in an message about failed connection to GPS receiver on N900 when I tried it. The only exception is GPSGate on HTC Touch HD - N900 connects fine but absolutely no location related data is visible through liblocation. On my laptop I am able to connect to it with Java ME CloudGPS version and GPSGate just fine. I have tried different NMEA logs as dummy sources (SIRF III, Quallcomm and some very simple ones) and N900 seem not to be able to understand that.

Ideally I would like to pass NMEA log as GPS data to N900. Do you know any working way to achieve this (or anything similiar) in order to test (and debug) GPS related software?

Thanks in advance

EDIT: Solution in post #2.

Re: Developing GPS app on N900 - how to emulate GPS from NMEA log file?
 

I have found a working solution. I had to uninstall Toshiba bluetooth stack on my Windows laptop and use Microsofts driver. In Control Panel -> Bluetooth Devices -> COM Ports I added incoming port COM5. Then I used this free tool to create a bridge device which forwarded NMEA file to COM5. After that setup on N900 I can connect to my laptop as an GPS device and it works very well.