Thursday, June 19, 2008

Using the Gosget GPS Data Logger in Linux via Wine (Ubuntu 8.04)

I managed to get the Gosget GPS Data Logger S1 to work under wine on Ubuntu 8.04 using (roughly) the following steps:

  1. Plug it into a usb port, Ubuntu will hot-plug it as a serial port automatically (probably /dev/ttyUSB0).
  2. Set the baud rate on the serial port:
    stty 115200 < /dev/ttyUSB0
    (I'm not sure if this is persistent after a reboot or not...)
  3. Create a "com" port in wine:
    ln -s /dev/ttyUSB0 ~/.wine/dosdevices/com1
  4. Put in the CD and run the installer in Wine:
    wine d:\PC\DataLogUtility\DataLogUtility.exe
  5. Run the Data Log Data Downloader via wine, put in the com port, connect, set a download folder and you'll be able to get .nmea files from the data logger.
  6. To convert the .nmea file to a .kml file I used gpsbabel -i nmea -o kml source.nmea dest.kml.

Figuring that out gave me a headache, hopefully this post will save someone else one. Please note however, that I'm writing the commands from memory so there may be something (hopefully harmless) wrong.

Also, if you switch the data logger into "G_Mouse" mode, it's possible to use gpsd to get GPS data in real-time. I switched the data-logger into "G_Mouse" mode via a Windows machine, but I presume the Data Log Data Downloader can do that via wine too.

And, gpsd and gpsbabel are both in the Ubuntu 8.04 repositories.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Ouch! The Sony GPS-CS1 mounts as a USB drive, for what it's worth. (Haven't actually tested this on Linux, but it should work.)

Tom said...

Yeah, not great I agree. Mounting as a USB drive is much simpler...

I haven't actually bought this yet, I'm borrowing it to try it out. It does have the advantage of being almost half the price of the Sony though.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing this info, Tom!

I've tried to access Gosget S1 in similar way on Debian and have no problem running Log utility and downloading logs, but most of them had 0 size and some have just few bites in time they are much bigger.
Have you encountered something like this too?

Tom said...

@Denis: I did have a problem a bit like that after writing this post, though I don't recall the details. I just using a Windows machine to get the logs, and as I mentioned above, I was only borrowing the Gosget and ended up buying an AMOD AGL3080 logger which works like a charm. Best of luck getting your logger to work.

Anonymous said...

Thanks, Tom!
Actually I've make it work but only via VirtualBox for now, with Wine I still got weird problems but hope to resolve them.

Right now I'm writing reviews for Holux M241 and Gosget S1 and wish to describe process of working with them on Linux.
Holux M-241 working without problem with CVS version of GPSBabel and MTKBabel but I didn't find reliable way to get logs from Gosget S1 yet.

Congratulations with your new GPS! I'll probably try to review it in future as well.

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