The problem: I have a Holux GPSport, which although it’s a nice device, requires me to use their fairly nasty Windows software to get the data off it.
The solution? Well there seems to be lots of software out there for this sort of thing, but getting it to work is tricky. In the end I went for GPSBabel, which is GPL and works on the Mac. It also appeared to support my device.
But I couldn’t get it to work. Maybe there is something in the documentation that I haven’t found, but the solution is to install these USB to UART Bridge Drivers from Silicon Labs. Basically the GPS device is serial, and the Silicon Labs chip bridges this across USB.
Thanks to this blogger who came to a similar conclusion with a different device.
The Mac driver seems pretty solid, and once installed you can use the
/dev/cu.SLAB_USBtoUART
device.
An example of using this with GPSBabel would be
gpsbabel -t -i m241 -f /dev/cu.SLAB_USBtoUART -o kml,lines,points,floating,track,trackdata,labels -F out.kml
Or you can use the GUI front end to do the same thing.
Note that if invoked from the command line, the current directory has to be writable so it can write its “data.bin” file – this seems like a bit of a failing as this should really be written to /tmp.
Other current issues include:
– It’s slow. There seems to be some baud rate setting going on in mtk_logger.c, and I guess they haven’t chosen a higher one because it isn’t supported by the chipset used in the GPSport.
– I can’t get useful KML out of it. It just comes out as one massive track, but this might be user error.