Experience Request: GPS Application

  • Thread starter Thread starter William Foster
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W

William Foster

Good afternoon all,

I want to play around and create a GPS application; I was wondering if
anyone knows of a good GPS Receiver that can be used to communicate with
Visual Studio .NET.

I am by no means an advanced user, but I believe that there are some GPS
receivers that output basic data which can then be picked up by a
running program to be used for graphing, diagnostics etc.

Any assistance you may be able to provide would be greatly appreciated.

Yours sincerely,

William Foster
 
I would recommend a GlobalSat BU-353 device.

It is a USB device and requires installation of a USB to Serial bridge
driver (included).

It draws whatever power it needs via USB, is waterproof and has a good
magnet in its base.

I have one 'magneted' to the spouting outside on the end of a 5m USB active
extension cable and find it brilliant for development work.

For field testing, of course, you need a tablet or laptop so that you can
walk or drive about.
 
Stephany,

Thanks for your assistance, I have had a look at them on the eBay, and
it is exactly what I was after.

Is it easy to make a connection using .Net to the data source? Or do you
need to use a supplementary program? I also noticed that the GlobalSat
company have a Bluetooth model now so no cables, but it doesn't say it
has the magnet that the model you have does, which would be great for
use in a car.

Thanks very much for your help, it is greatly appreciated.

Yours sincerely,

William Foster
 
The bluetooth models have a non-slip pad on the bottom, suitable for sitting
up on the dash, but they are not advertised as waterproof.

The problem with using a BT model inside a car is that a significant portion
of the sky is not observervable because of the roof, shell struts etc. and a
lot of modern vehicles have special glass that nicely blocks heat and UV
rays but also blocks radio waves.

The magnet on the USB model is strong enough for you to be able to position
the device on the roof of the vehicle, without any fear of it falling or
been blown off, and feed the cable in a window. Because it gets it's power
form the host computer you don't have to warry about the battery going flat.

I have evaluated a number of devices, both BT and USB and I have found that
that, in general, USB devices are more reliable than USB devices. The
GlobalSat BU-353 performs significantly better than any other consumer level
device I have evaluated, (even better than the manafcturers claims).

As I said, you need to have the USD To Serial bridge driver installed, but
installing that is painless.

In .NET You just open a SerialPort object with the appropriate settings and
read the data.

Of course, dealing with the data is a different matter but I won't spoil
your fun :)
 
Stephany,

Thanks for the assistance, now all I have to do is go and find one; eBay
will come to my rescue is the local computer companies don't.

Thanks once again!

Yours sincerely,

William Foster
 
Peter,

Thanks for the link ! I found that one last night, it is very well
written; and explains the needs to a beginner. Although I will still be
posting a couple of queries I think.

Thanks once again !

Yours sincerely,

William Foster
 
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