GPSd

gpsd is a daemon for connecting to a GPS device and supplying GPS information to one or more client programs (such as KisMAC).

Although there are (or have been) versions of gpsd in fink and darwinports, these have either been removed or are out of date. The latest release on the GPSd web site as of this writing is 2.32, and still includes a number of consequential bugs. The latest (developer) SVN revision at this time is 3280, but that still includes bugs in the handling of NMEA devices and mode parsing.

gpsdX is a Universal Binary build of GPSd, complete with an installer and GUI configuration utility - this should be everything you need to get up and running with GPSd on Mac OS X! It includes patches for all identified bugs, and many users have already reported success installing it.

installation

• download the gpsdX installer
• open it
• follow the prompts (and if you want to know more about it, please do read the Read Me)
• once installation is complete, connect your GPS and open the gpsdX Config application in your Applications folder
• choose your device, then click select & start
• gpsdX should now be installed, configured and running. It will load with other internet daemons on system start, so you don't need to do anything from now on except use it!

GPS devices supported

NMEA	yes
FV-18	yes
SiRF-II	yes
Trimble TSIP	yes
Tripmate	yes
Earthmate	yes
iTrax	yes
iTalk	yes
Garmin	yes
True North	no
Evermore	no

one final note

I believe that this is a functional Universal Binary, but have not yet received confirmation of it running on an Intel Mac. If you have an Intel Mac and it works for you (or if it doesn't work), please e-mail me.

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superceded information

This version of gpsd is version 3279 from SVN, with added patches to resolve some major bugs with regard to reporting of speed and altitude data from NMEA sources.

installation

• download this gpsd source tarball
• go into Terminal, change to the directory where you downloaded the file, and type the following commands:
  • tar -xzvf gpsd-kismac.tgz
  • cd gpsd-trunk
  • ./configure
  • make
  • sudo make install

running gpsd

• find out what device your GPS uses by changing to the /dev directory and look for a file name like cu.usbserial0 or tty.gps0
• start gpsd using the command
  • /usr/sbin/gpsd -f /dev/cu.usbserial0 (replace cu.usbserial0 with the name of your GPS device)
• that's it!

You'll need to start GPSd each time you restart your computer - see the attached sample AppleScript file to make a login item to start the daemon.

To come

Here's how you could make it universal: http://developer.apple.com/opensource/buildingopensourceuniversal.html -- themacuser