I’m pretty excited I got my USB GPS receiver in the mail today. It’s even small enough that Canada Post was able to fit it into my small apartment mailbox. No going to the depot to pick it up! It’s a little bit larger than I would have thought, but still pretty small (about 1.5 x the size of regular USB thumb drive). Here is a picture of it:
It took me all of 5 minutes to get it running in Ubuntu. All you need to do is enable the Prolific Serial to USB module called pl2303. After that, you need to set the baud rate to 4800 and off you go. Here is a quick list of the commands required to get this receiver running:
$ sudo modprobe pl2303
$ sudo echo "pl2303" >> /etc/modules
$ dmesg
... lots of output snipped ...
[ 1003.292048] usb 2-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
[ 1003.496629] usb 2-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 1003.499558] pl2303 2-1:1.0: pl2303 converter detected
[ 1003.519282] usb 2-1: pl2303 converter now attached to ttyUSB0
$ stty 4800 < /dev/ttyUSB0
$ cat /dev/ttyUSB0
... press Ctrl+C to stop reading from the device
That’s all there is to it! Now I’m off to write a Python script to set the baud rate, read the output, and parse it into something more useful. After that I can start working on integrating it into the GPS applications I just started writing (more on this in a later post).
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