GPSd position

Display a GPS position

It might be useful to display an external GPS position on the GCS. That might be your ground station position (e.g. if operating from a moving ship) or you walking through the field with your laptop searching an outlanded aircraft.

Using gpsd

For now you have to install the packages gpsd and libgps-dev by hand.

aptitude install gpsd libgps-dev 

The GPS receiver could be connected through a serial port, USB, Bluetooth, a network, ... The gpsd package is used to interface to the receiver. There are several ways to tell gpsd how to connect to your receiver. The simplest is to start gpsd (as root) with the device you want.

gpsd /dev/ttyUSB0

If your GPS receiver is always connected to the same port (and can not be confused with another Paparazzi modem) you can put the device into /etc/default/gpsd and start gpsd automatically. There should be a way that udev takes care of that.

START_DAEMON="true"
DAEMON_OPTS=""
DEVICES="/dev/ttyS2"
USBAUTO="false"

A Bluetooth GPS receiver can be configured in /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf. In this example it can be used as /dev/rfcomm0 (put your GPS devices Bluetooth address).

rfcomm0 {
  bind yes;
  device 00:06:66:00:53:AE;
}

Using gpsd2ivy

There is a small tool that gets the position info from gpsd and forwards that to the ivy bus so that the gcs can display it. It is called gpsd link on the Paparazzi center tools slider.

For now you have to build gpsd2ivy by hand.

cd sw/ground_segment/tmtc
make gpsd2ivy

and start it

./gpsd2ivy