My place to share some bits and bytes

Thanks to the hard work of many people OpenMoko finally released the GPS driver for the GTA01 device. See the Mail and get it while it's hot.

BTW, roh needs to start blogging. For propaganda purpose only of course. :)

Bluetooth GPS reciever just rock. Small, easy to use, no cables and useable with different devices. Once my day-by-day gadgets and notebook have all one build-in I can get it of it, but that will take some time.

So the toy is called BT-451 and has a u-blox ANTARIS4 SuperSense chip build-in. Getting it to work is easy:

hcitool scan
rfcomm connect hci0 

After this you have a serial port (perhaps /dev/bluetooth/rfcomm/0) where all the NMEA data comes in. Just give this one to gpsd and you can use it in multiple applications. I also heard that this is even easier with gypsy. No more need to deal with rfcomm yourself. That screams for a test once it is in debian.

There is some more stuff I like about the BT-451. Once it had a fix I was able to put it in a pocket of my jacket, sit in my car and it still gets the position. Tested with driving home with my notebook on the seat next to be and tracking the drive with navit. Daniel also discovered that the USB plug is not only for charging, but also shows up as ACM modem and spies out the NMEA on /dev/ttyACM0. And once connected via USB it also works without a battery.

The above mentioned navit is one of the most promising stuff I like to use regulary with the GPS. It's a navigation system with a routing engine. Not only download maps and show them, but do real routing with vector based maps. As we all know maps are problematic. OpenStreetMap is working on this problem. Until this is useable everywhere I like to have some commercial maps I can route with on my linux system. Don't expect some vendor has got this ready. :(

But FOSS has, as almost, an answer for me. Navit support different vector maps for commercial CDs. Just buy such one, copy the files and navit handles the rest. Great.

No I just need to test the navit setup on my Neos. :)

Fill forms in PDF files is a long missing feature for me. Using acroread just for this was always a reason to feel guilty. ;)

But thanks to the work on poppler and evince this gap is closed. I know this news is perhaps not bleeding edge, but just today I installed it from debian experimental. Be aware that you need to install evince-gtk instead of evince.

Thanks to everybody who made this happen.