This is a static mirror of http://myy.haaga-helia.fi/~a0602523/linuxgps/, crawled 2009-06-16.

Introduction

In this project I'm trying to build a Linux laptop, which would be capable of locating itself with GPS and showing the current location on a map.

I got the idea by figuring out what to do with an old laptop and a bluetooth GPS receiver, which were gathering dust on my desk. Only thing what I was missing was a Bluetooth USB dongle. After I bought a generic Bluetooth dongle, I had all hardware what was needed.

I decided to install a Linux distribution to the laptop, which would be light enough to be run on it. I chose to install Xubuntu Linux. It's basicly a derivate from Ubuntu Linux, the difference is that it uses XFCE instead of Gnome as the window manager.

What's used in the project?

Laptop:

Compaq Armada M300

Pentium III 500MHz
392MB RAM
80GB HDD

GPS receiver:

Insmat BT-338 with INS SiRF III chipset

Bluetooth USB dongle:

Generic Trust USB dongle

Installation media

I downloaded the .iso image of Xubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) from http://www.xubuntu.org/get and burned it to a CD.

Xubuntu installation

I set the laptop to boot from CD and rebooted to fire up the installation.

The installation was easy, it asked a few basic questions like language, keyboard layout and howto partition disk. After answering those it copied the files to the hard disk. After reboot I got login.

Installing the GPS software

After I had installed Xubuntu, I updated the system and installed the needed software with running these commands in Terminal:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get install gpsd gpsd-clients

After doing that I begun the configuration of Bluetooth. I plugged in the Bluetooth dongle and turned the GPS receiver on. I ran the following command to find out the MAC address of the GPS device:

$ hcitool scan

I got the following as the result:

Scanning...
	00:0D:B5:31:53:5A	BT-GPS-31535A

If you don't get any results, your GPS receiver is most likely out of range.

Next I added the GPS device to the file /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf with:

$ sudo nano /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf

After adding the new device, the file looked like this:

rfcomm0 {
        # Automatically bind the device at startup
        bind yes;

        # Bluetooth address of the device
        device 00:0D:B5:31:53:5A;

        # RFCOMM channel for the connection
        channel 1;

        # Description of the connection
        comment "Bluetooth GPS";
}

Before the GPS signal can be received, the GPS Daemon must be started:

$ gpsd /dev/rfcomm0

Now the GPS signal should be available for applications. It can be tried by running:

$ xgps

Xgps should look similar to this, when the GPS signal is available:

Installing Navit

To get a location on a map, I decided to install Navit. It cannot be installed straight away with apt-get. The following packages needs to be installed, before Navit can be compiled:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential
$ sudo apt-get install pkg-config
$ sudo apt-get install automake
$ sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libtiff-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libtool
$ sudo apt-get install libsmu-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libfribidi-dev
$ sudo apt-get install gettext
$ sudo apt-get install cvs
$ sudo apt-get install libdbus-glib-1-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev
$ sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts
$ sudo apt-get install subversion

After installing the needed packages, I downloaded the source code to my home directory:

$ cd ~
$ svn co https://navit.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/navit/trunk/navit/navit-source

Next step was to run the scripts, which prepare the source codes for compilation. I chose to point the Navit configuration to my home directory, so that it won't install itself to the usual directories later on.

$ cd navit-source
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure --prefix=/home/*username*/navit

The actual compilation is fired up with:

$ make
$ make install

After the installation completed, I ran Navit with:

$ cd ../navit/bin
$ ./navit

Navit ran fine, so the compilation had been a success.

Configuring Navit

Now I needed some maps for it. I downloaded the Open Street Maps for Europe from http://downloads.cloudmade.com/europe/europe.navit.bin.zip.

I unpacked the maps with:

$ unzip europe.navit.bin.zip
$ mv europe.navit.bin /home/*username*/navit/share/navit/maps/

To get the new maps working I changed the configuration file:

$ nano -w ~/navit/share/navit/navit.xml

from

<mapset enabled="yes">
	<xi:include href="$NAVIT_SHAREDIR/maps/*.xml"/>
</mapset>

<mapset enabled="no">
	<map type="binfile" enabled="yes" data="/media/mmc2/MapsNavit/osm_europe.bin"/>
</mapset>

<mapset enabled="no">
	<xi:include href="$NAVIT_SHAREDIR/maps/*.xml"/>
</mapset>

<mapset enabled="yes">
	<map type="binfile" enabled="yes" data="/home/*username*/navit/

	share/navit/maps/europe.navit.bin"/>
</mapset>

I noticed that Navit didn't work with GPSD for some reason as xgps did, so I modified the configuration file again from:

<vehicle name="Local GPS" profilename="car" enabled="yes" active="1" 

source="gpsd://localhost" gpsd_query="w+xj" color="#0000ff">

<vehicle name="Local GPS" profilename="car" enabled="yes" active="1" 

source="file:/dev/rfcomm0" gpsd_query="w+xj" color="#0000ff">

Next I looked up the PID of the GPSD so that I could kill it. Otherwise Navit wouldn't be able to use the /dev/rfcomm0 device.

$ ps -fu *username*|grep gpsd

*username*      5461     1  0 21:21 ?        00:00:02 gpsd /dev/rfcomm0

In my case the PID was 5461. Proceeded to kill the GSPD:

$ kill 5461

After that I ran Navit again and found out that it worked with the new settings.

Navit

Using GPS with Linux