Background
As a computer geek and a sailor I want to have navigation system on-board. The obvious choice is OpenCPN which is an opensource navigation system.
When it comes to hardware it is a little bit more tricky. A balance between money and what you get. I have for several years wanted a Panasonic Thoughbook but they cost alot. It is hard to motivate that price when it will be used just a few weeks during the summer. After browsing ebay I find a used Panasonic Thoughbook CF-19
for a reasonable price, €170 incuding shipping form Germany. I have to live with that the keyboard is not Swedish. When the computer arrived I found that it was equipped with a builtin GPS reciever. That is very handy 😉
This article describes howto get the builtin GPS receiver working with gpsd.
Pre requirements
*Panasonic ThoughBook CF-19 with a builtin Gps receiver
*Operating system with Gpsd installed, I use lubuntu. Lubuntu has modest requirements on the hardware and for such an old box it is good to not have all the bells and whistles.
How to
Bios settings
I tried to use the auto settings in the bios but I never managed to get that running. So I changed the GPS settings to enabled.
Linux
After some googling it looks like the gps receiver is attached as a serial port number 3, in linux that is /dev/ttyS3
peter@Tough:~$ ls -al /dev/ttyS3
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 67 Mar 10 15:28 /dev/ttyS3
So the group owner of the serialport is dialout.
To get access to the serialport for the gps daemon I modify the /etc/group file
dialout:x:20:gpsd
To get gpds to understand which port the gps is connected to i modified /etc/default/gpsd
# Default settings for the gpsd init script and the hotplug wrapper.
# Start the gpsd daemon automatically at boot time
START_DAEMON="true"
# Use USB hotplugging to add new USB devices automatically to the daemon
USBAUTO="true"
# Devices gpsd should collect to at boot time.
# They need to be read/writeable, either by user gpsd or the group dialout.
DEVICES="/dev/ttyS3"
# Other options you want to pass to gpsd
GPSD_OPTIONS=""
Start gpsd
sudo /etc/init.d/gpsd start
Test
To test that you have contact with the gps receiver there is several options, some of them are:
- xgpsmon
- gpsmon
- gpspipe
An example of how gpspipe can look like:
gpspipe -r 127.0.0.1
{"class":"VERSION","release":"3.11","rev":"3.11-3","proto_major":3,"proto_minor":9}
{"class":"DEVICES","devices":[{"class":"DEVICE","path":"/dev/ttyS3","driver":"SiRF","activated":"2016-03-10T15:46:31.952Z","flags":1,"native":1,"bps":4800,"parity":"N","stopbits":1,"cycle":1.00}]}
{"class":"WATCH","enable":true,"json":false,"nmea":true,"raw":0,"scaled":false,"timing":false,"split24":false,"pps":false}
$GPZDA,154633.59,10,03,2016,00,00*6B
$GPGGA,154633,5927.3927,N,01755.3274,E,1,04,2.40,15.16,M,26.139,M,,*78
$GPRMC,154633,A,5927.3927,N,01755.3274,E,0.3836,37.068,100316,,*18
$GPGSA,A,3,24,19,12,01,,,,,,,,,50.0,2.4,50.0*38
March 19th, 2016 at 10:45 pm
Hur exakt är den? https://www.google.com/maps/place/59°27'23.6%22N+17°55'19.6%22E/@59.4564929,17.922272,19z
March 20th, 2016 at 9:17 pm
Verkar väldigt exakt
December 17th, 2016 at 8:42 am
For my Toughbook CF-31 the GPS is attached to /dev/ttyS0. Once I set this in the gpsd init script (where your’s references /dev/ttyS3) it started streaming GPS data.