Re: [Gpsbabel-code] code/protocol for BG728 ("navibe mercury") logger

[Robert L. <rob...@gp...>]

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 9:24 PM, Thorben Thuermer <r0...@co...> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> i've been using this device, reverse-engineered it's protocol,
> and wrote some code to interface with it (none could be found on the web),
>

It's the night for these.



> ...which i think i should share, an this seems to be the best place for
> that.
>

As this code pretty clearly springboarded from GPSBabel's internals, that
does seem right.



> ofcourse the windows software is horrible and partially broken.
>

It always is, it seems.  I don't know why these loggers have to be so
terrible, but it sure does seem like most are.


> (for the map display it embeds IE, displaying google maps - but the map
>  tiles do not load, i guess they are somewhat violating the google TOS.)
>

That's not cool.


generally, the serial (not usb!) communication seems flaky,
> transfered data is regularly corrupted, and crc-checking and
> retries are needed to get usable results.
>

Yikes.   Implementing error-detection/retry over a bus that this for you.
 That means they're losing/corrupting data between their UART and their USB
controller and relying on software to make up for that.

 and my code to download logs. it's not perfecly clean, but works and i've

been using it for months...
>

Since it was crowbarred out of GPSBabel, it doesn't look like it'd be
terribly difficult to graft back in.

I don't have the hardware, so I can't test it, but I'm reasonably
comfortable with the inner working of GPSBabel.   If you're interested in
seeing it integrated and helping to support it as part of the product, I
can help make that happen.  If you just want to throw the code over the
wall and run away , we'll leave this conversation in the archives for the
next person that may have one of these.

Either way, thanx for sharing.
RJL