Notices

Is there any software available that would just allow me to view the output of my Nokia BT GPS and store waypoints when I ask it to?

gpsbabel should be able to do this, but I have not had much luck using gpsbabel with a handlheld GPS in Ubuntu.

I know a bit more about how the gps works, but am no further towards finding a simple gps application.

To restate what I want. I want to log GPS output, with all pertinent information from the GPS (including HDOP, VDOP, number of satellites). I want to do this for single fixes, and over a timespan.

I found some guidance for programmers in Maemo Garage, but it was not very relevant.

But at least I now understand that the n800 uses gpsd. And that gpsd only runs when a gps-aware application runs.

Two specific questions.

1) How can I manually start and stop gpsd?

2) How can I get data from gpsd either into a text file or into gpsbabel?

There are a couple of simple clients for gpsd, but they don't seem to have been ported to the n800. An alternative seems to be to use nc, but that didn't work for me.

I am not a programmer, so I don't want to get into using the gpsd libraries and such. But I am very happy to hack simple scripts.

If you just want to save the NMEA data and process it later then you should probably use this: https://garage.maemo.org/projects/gps-saver/

I seem to remember seeing an example of its use somewhere. In any case if you look at the source you'll see how it links into the GPS framework, but you may not even need to do that, just install it and run from the command line and see what options it has, it may do exactly what you want (i.e. log to file)

it would be great if there'd be a solution for OS2006 on the 770, too. AFAIK, gpsd is not available yet for the 770 - or is it?

gps-saver is very simple program that saves fix information to gzipped file. The format is not NMEA but a simple and extensible text format which compresses quite well. The format can be changed to something else by changing the gps_callback() function if necessary. Typically GPS device produces one fix/second which provides a lot of data during the day, that is why the file is gzipped and gpx format is not used. I have one 8 hour run, which produced 624kb gzipped file which contained over 28600 fixes and which was about 5MB uncompressed.

I am currently finalizing a new gps-saver version which supports OS2008 better than the old version. The new package will also have a simple python UI so that GPS can be monitored in real time. I am hoping to release the new version within next two weeks.

Sounds useful.

I came across gps-saver in the Garage, but there wasn't enough info for me to decide whether it could do what I wanted or not.

I look forward to a new version. I may have to ask for help/advice in changing the output format.

Thanks for the question&answer, I had been (vaguely) looking for something like this, too.

One useful export format I can think of is the one accepted by apps which add EXIF location tags to digital pictures. Thus when you go vacationing you could tuck away your tablet & GPS in the backpack, shoot away all day, and afterwards use the log files to tag your pix...

The page I linked to in the second post describes exactly how to do that with gps-saver.

Indeed, thanks fro the heads-up. Soon as my N800 arrives, I'll try it out.

This is exactly the reason I developed gps-saver, I had the same problem as you have. In my last holiday, I had my N800 running with gps-saver and BT GPS constantly. In the morning I started the program, had it running whole day and ended up with one file with location information for that day. The battery in the tablet and BT GPS device lasted fine for that 8-10 hour duration.

For post-processing this information (attaching location data to photos) I used gtag (https://garage.maemo.org/projects/gtag). Unfortunately the post-processing tool is not yet optimal, like what to do if the tablet clock is not the same as camera clock and what if both are different from correct GPS time. This happened to me so now I have a pile of photos and location data that are slighly out of sync but I am working to fix gtag to handle this situation.
The idea of gtag is to attach location info to photo exif data and then generate a google maps file with fotos and descriptions. This would be a journal of your vacation with photos about places where you were with descriptions. An example can be seen here http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=e...4938&z=10&om=1
I do not have descriptions part of gtag ready yet so the example photos do not have any descriptive text with them. The gtag has no UI, it is just a command line program, so it is not a nice tool to work with, some UI for manipulating the photos etc would be nice to have, unfortunately I do not have time to create UI for gtag.