Comments on: Bluetooth GPS with Ubuntu 9.05

By: steve

steve — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 15:26:40 +0000

One last tip – if you copy / paste the rfcomm.conf entry above, watch out in case the quotes are pasted wrongly going from browser to terminal window. You might get ‘syntax error line 22′ when trying to connect, in which case delete the quotes and type them in via the keyboard).

By: steve

steve — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 15:23:12 +0000

One extra line seems to be needed:

sudo rfcomm connect 4 (or 0, or whatever number you selected in rfcomm.conf)

The blue light on your M-1000 will flash every 3secs indicating connection established, after which both xgps and tangogps should show you something interesting :)

Enjoy!

By: steve

steve — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 14:46:02 +0000

Anyone tried this with 10.04? And a Holux M-1000?

Manually setting up rfcomm port and giving gpsd the -b option as above, gets me the M-1000 device recognised under bluetooth manager. This is progress, but despite device being configured ‘successfully’ and selecting it for use with geo-location services, alas, neither xgps nor tangogps seem to recognise it exists….. :(

M-1000 works perfectly with my nokia e51, so must be on ubuntu side. A few others out there struggling with this too it seems.

By: Sparta

Sparta — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 01:24:34 +0000

Thanks for the info. I also have a Holux GPSlim 240, and I am running Ubuntu 9.10. I followed the instructions, but GpsDrive doesn’t seem to capture the GPS data. It always shows “no gps data”. I look into the /dev/ directory but I don’t see ‘rfcomm4′. Additionally, by default, gpsd also adds “-F /var/run/gpsd.sock” as additional arguments.

I ran the previous commands successfully with almost identical output (except for the device address, of course).

By: goile

goile — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 08:11:42 +0000

Thanks for the above. I also have seaclear working now (through wine). Still no success with SOBvMAX.

By: John Jorgensen

John Jorgensen — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:11:57 +0000

I haven’t used my GPS with wine, but here is a post from a guy who has: http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=39497

He makes a link in ~/.wine/dosdevices/ to rfcomm0 and wine apparently can use this to communicate with the GPS.

By: goile

goile — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:17:55 +0000

Thanks for your help.

Further to my above;

I disconnected from blueman and followed your advice from point “4″ above, i.e. pretended the hang never happened and went on to the next step

I used “rfcomm0″

I have managed to get xgps and Gpsdrive working

However when I run SOBvMAX through WINE, there is no GPS input to the program despite the steady light showing the GPS is connected to the notebook.

SOBvMAX shows that ports COM 1, 2, 3, 4 are detected but no GPS input.

Would appreciate some help with this specific problem.

By: goile

goile — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:59:38 +0000

Thank you for the aforementioned suggestions.

I tried them out but they didn’t work. I tried but couldn’t install bluez-pin (see below)

~$ sudo apt-get install bluez-pin
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
E: Couldn’t find package bluez-pin
~$

I then installed blueman 1.10-1~ppa3j, and ran it.

In the device setup menu, I connected the GPS to serial port. I get a confirmation that the notebook is successfully connected to the serial port. The blinking light on the GPS also stops blinking and becomes steady – which indicates the GPS is sending information to the notebook. (It however does not identify the port number). However when I run xgps or gpsdrive there is no GPS information available.

When I run the same Bluetooth GPS in Win-XP, and connect with SPP slave, it always connects hrough COM port 8, and the blinking light steadies as soon as GPS information begins showing on the notebook in the navigation software (SOBvMAX).

I ran the same software (SOBvMAX) through WINE in Ubuntu 9.04, but again there is no GPS information available.

Could it be possible that the GPS is sending information to the notebook, but I have not identified the port? If so how can I identify and configure the port?

Where am I going wrong?

By: John Jorgensen

John Jorgensen — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 17:42:37 +0000

The only things I can think of are:
1) ensure that your GPS is awake and not in some power save mode.
2) make sure your computer’s bluetooth adapter hasn’t gone into some power save mode.
3) restarting the bluetooth service may clear the problem.
4) pretend the hang never happened and skip that step. In the next step, try to use Channel 1 as in the example above. If it still doesn’t work and you have the time, try a few other channels (2,3, etc).

I don’t think I have any other suggestions at this point.

By: goile

goile — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:44:44 +0000

I tried the above with my ALTINA GBT-709 GPS. after the 1st step when i type $ sdptool browse 00:0A:3A:24:AE:60, I only get
Browsing 00:0A:3A:24:AE:60…
$

Nothing further happens. Can you help?