IOSA.it Open Archaeology

GPSBabel converts waypoints, tracks, and routes from one format to another, whether that format is a common mapping format like Delorme, Streets and Trips, or even a serial upload or download to a GPS unit such as those from Garmin and Magellan. By flattening the Tower of Babel that the authors of various programs for manipulating GPS data have imposed upon us, it returns to us the ability to freely move our own waypoint data between the programs and hardware we choose to use. It contains extensive data manipulation abilities making it a convenient for server-side processing or as the backend for other tools. GPSBabel runs on Microsoft Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, and XP plus POSIX OSes such as Linux, UnixWare, OpenServer, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OSX.

gpsd is a service daemon that monitors one or more GPSes attached to a host computer through serial or USB ports, making all data on the location/course/velocity of the sensors available to be queried on TCP port 2947 of the host computer. With gpsd, multiple GPS client applications (such as navigational and wardriving software) can share access to GPSes without contention or loss of data. Also, gpsd responds to queries with a format that is substantially easier to parse than the NMEA 0183 emitted by most GPSes. The gpsd distribution includes a linkable C service library, a C++ wrapper class, and a Python module that developers of gpsd-aware applications can use to encapsulate all communication with gpsd. Besides gpsd itself, the project provides auxiliary tools for diagnostic monitoring and profiling of GPSes and feeding GPS-aware applications specified track data for diagnostic purposes.