Mapping Hacks

Connect to Your GPS from Multiple Applications #57

Chapter 5, Mapping with Gadgets

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HACK

Visualizing the Output of gpsd

Another useful tool that ships with gpsd is called, simply, gps, and it’s an

X11 program for visualizing gpsd output. You start it by running /usr/local/

bin/gps. Figure 5-29 shows a typical gps display, including the nifty satellite

visibility chart.

What’s particularly cool about this screenshot is that it was taken on a dif-

ferent machine than the one the GPS was connected to; the two computers

were connected via a wireless network, with gpsd running on the one with

the serial link to the GPS. We then ran

gps -p x.x.x.x:2947 on the other

laptop, where

x.x.x.x was the IP address of the gpsd machine, and voilà!

Hacking the Hack

At this point, you should be ready to run kismet [Hack #17] or gpsdrive [Hack #63],

or kismet and gpsdrive together, or, indeed, your choice of GPS-using *NIX

applications. The nice thing about gpsd is that once you’ve got it running,

you can kind of forget about it. So we’d like to share with you just one more

Figure 5-29. A typical gps display

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Chapter 5, Mapping with Gadgets

#57 Connect to Your GPS from Multiple Applications

HACK

thing you can do with gpsd, which is to set up a little CGI application on the

Web that shows your current location in real ...