Re: [Gumstix-users] gps repeater via bluetooth

[Colin S. <cj...@ab...>]

> Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2006 14:12:29 -0600
> From: Brad Midgley <bmi...@xm...>
> Subject: [Gumstix-users] gps repeater via bluetooth
> To: gum...@li...
> Message-ID: <44E...@xm...>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Hey
>
> I have read that gpsd can act as a gps repeater. It shouldn't be too
> hard to hook this up to a bluetooth server socket so a pda could get the
> gps data too. Has anyone played around with it?

I thought gpsd operated over TCP/IP? So what it basically does is make
your NMEA data (or gpsd's own format) available over a tcp socket. Then as
many clients as you wish using whatever network technology you wish can
connect to this.

Given this i'd say the obvious thing to do is to use a PAN bluetooth
network  rather than a bluetooth serial port (rfcomm) system to distribute
out the data. The downside of this approach is that it probably won't work
on most phones as they don't support bluetooth networking.

I've used gpsd in tcp/ip mode to allow a java application i'm writing to
read from the gps without having to grapple with java serial port
libraries. But that only connects 1 client at a time.

>
> (It should also be possible using alternating sdp advertisements to
> support 2 pdas simultaneously... that would be a trick no current bt gps
> can do)

Sounds like an interesting trick, would love to have bluetooth gps which
multiple devices can read form.