There seems to be a lot of effort going into a full-blown navigation system over in the “Projects” area. I would like to take an interim step that would allow us to interface a generic GPS receiver to the Empeg display. Fortunately, there is a nice generic ASCII serial protocol that is available on almost all GPS receivers with I/O.

This could provide several useful benefits.

1) Allow for debugging the hardware interface and GPS in-vehicle installation.
2) Provide a useful diagnostic screen for long term use with a navigation system.
3) Give us the best possible source of Position, Velocity and Time in-vehicle for setting your clock and calibrating your speedometer.

The attachment is a brief reference specification that describes what is required in MS Word format. The resulting display would look something like this.



I think this could be included in Hijack or written as a separate application, similar in complexity to “Viewer” (which is what I used to produce the above mock-up). Thanks to John for this handy contribution.

I would be willing to fumble through this but I will need a lot of hand-holding. I do have Cygwin installed but am lost about how to get Empeg code compiled, I am not skilled in this art! If any of you would be willing to help me get started or better yet produce a primitive shell for this job that I could then expand that would be very welcome. A reference to a tutorial would also be helpful, I am really a hardware guy and seem to be slow to pick up this new skill.