*nod*

My view with buying the tripmate was it was a cheap entry level product that had the features I required to "get going". I can't see it being so inaccurate as to be unusable, especially considering the approach I am intending on taking... Sure once the system is running and I can see myself with more than a few waypoints, or wanting to do more interesting things requiring more accurate location data, that will be the time for me to get a better GPS...

If you are looking to buy a GPS now and are looking for something more accurate, it would be an interesting exercise to see how whatever system gets built handles the different qualities of data..

As for conversion of GPS data for the Earthmate...gpsd can talk to the unit so I don't see the binary format as being a problem... at least from the point of view of getting basic date, lat, lon and speed info out of it... But maybe you can think of more information we might want access to... I am new to GPS's myself... :)

Cheers

Kim

As my dad is a passionate sailor, he has a few GPS units that I will most likely be able to borrow.

I'll probably be able to get my hands on his Garmin GPS-12, already a dated unit but it is able to output NMEA.

If somebody wants me to test an interface or develop an interface for it (software-wise), I'd be willing to help.

Unfortunately I do not have any experience with map-based routing, however.

Till

Well the date/lat/long stuff would seem to be the easy part. Any sort of routing would open up an entire new can of worms as the other navigation/GPS threads in the Projects board have suggested. There are all sorts of different map formats, and doing routing based on this data doesn't seem to be an easy programming task.. I doubt any of us have expertise in this, and I don't know of any freely available software for parsing out these vector formats for routing purposes, but then again I haven't looked very closely yet.

But the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, so lat/long would be a nice first goal.

-Tony
MkII #554

This is my thought exactly...

I have some experience with GIS... and could probably write some code to do routing, given the information was in a format I could deal with... but from my point of view that is much further down the track... I suppose that also comes from the fact that out here in Perth routing is less of a problem... The city itself is pretty easy to get around... and when you get out of the city... well there aren't exactly many options to get you lost... *grin*

I suppose for the moment my interest in Nav is more from an informational point of view... I want the empeg to be able to tell me when I am near to cheap petrol... or how far I have travelled this trip... or maybe allow me to profile a couple of different routes to and from work to compare them...

Cheers

Kim

Almost all in-car nav systems supplement the GPS data with gyros and speed sensors. That said, I used to use a Garmin GPS12 with a laptop and it was pretty good (but you had to read the map yourself, it didn't do automatic recalculation of routes).

Rob