[Xastir] Garmin + Lantronix = gpsd equivalent?

[Curt, WE7U]

On Mon, 21 Mar 2005, Jack Twilley wrote:

> I have a widget on my desk made by Lantronix.  It's called a "Micro",
> and it basically translates TTL serial to Ethernet and back.  I can
> connect a serial device to it, then telnet to a particular IP address
> and port and get the serial data.
>
> If I recall correctly, the gpsd software basically takes the serial
> output of an NMEA device like a Garmin GPS and makes it available to
> folks who telnet to a particular IP address and port.
>
> If I could attach the GPS to the Micro (with some TTL<->RS-232 glue if
> necessary) it would be no big immediate gain.  However, if I used the
> wireless version of the device... that makes things much more
> interesting and far more useful for running xastir while mobile.
>
> Any thoughts?

Yea, what you're talking about is called a terminal server.  I used
to use them here at work to connect a Unix server out to the
production lines to test computers that talked serial.  It saved
having to run long serial lines all the way back to the server
(which they used to do way before I started working here).

The gpsd code wouldn't be hard to tweak to do what you're after.  In
fact it might work to do that right now.  I think we just connect to
a particular IP:Port and then send one or two characters to
"turn-on" the NMEA stream.  I suspect the device would either ignore
those characters or pass them on to the GPS, which again would be
ignored, so you're probably good to go right now.  If we need to
have a flag to disable sending those chars, we could add that as
well.

--
Curt, WE7U.   APRS Client Comparisons: http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
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