Julian Bleecker

I tossed together a Processing sketch that'll read most GPS devices. I've tested it with a Garmin GPSmap 60cs and a Bluetooth GPS from Socket. It's also pretty much cross platform.

There are two classes. One's the ever present start-up class, called GPS. The other is a class called GPSReader that talks to the GPS device and parses out some of the more useful info. Right now it'll just give you lat/lon, speed (knots) and a UTC timestamp, but there are stubs in there to handled number of satellites in view and other stuff.

You'll need to modify the serial initialization method to set it to read the serial/bluetooth/usb port to which your GPS is connected. The applet will spit out all the available ports, so if you're not sure which one it's connected to, you can just try each in turn.

Problems I've had that you might want to be aware of mostly occured with the Bluetooth GPS. It would sometimes hang Processing for some reason. I had to reboot until I discovered that I could go into Bluetooth preferences and click "disconnect" for the Bluetooth pairing and it would let go and I could stop the applet and figure out what was wrong. Cycling the power on the unit fixed the problem.

Some useful GPS related stuff is to be found at http://del.icio.us/jbleecker/GPS.

Let me know if you have problems!

Download ProcessingGPS_0.0.zip