[gpsd-users] Toggle SiRF and NMEA in a Navilock BU-313 USB GPS mouse

[Peter Jenik]

Hello GPSD-Users,

I went all the way from MS-DOS 2.1 to Win 8.1. Finally #10 from Redmont made me turn my back on M$. Sorry, but I need an OS not a "service". So I still keep win7 until its EOL. My first steps into the *nix-world were Ubuntu followed by Raspbian Wheezy/Jessie. I love the Raspberries and do some quite satisfying hardware hacks. One of my projects is AIS reception via a TVBT-Dongle and SDR#. Amongst others I contribute to Marientraffic.com. Being a skipper too pointed my interest to GPS. So this project came up to plug a GPS mouse to a RaspberryPi-2 and have it spit its data over the local Ethernet.

 

First tries with gpsmon <gpsmon /dev/ttyUSB0> were successful. Gpsd as a process as well as a daemon in conjunction with different clients (gpsmon, xgps...) did what it was supposed to do. The BU-313 (ca. 2003 by Navilock, NMEA and SiRF II capable) took ages to get its ephemerals, probably because it was out of use for more than 10 years. In the end it spat out NMEA data as expected. I cross-checked it with my win7-netbook, the device functioned in both OSes flawlessly. GPSD is a great set of software, big Thank You to the author.

 

That made me adventurous. I fiddled with some -b and -n parameters in gpsctl. Documenting what I did exactly was not on my agenda. So all of a sudden the BU-313 switched to binary SiRF and stuck with it. Still it gives correct coordinates but won't switch back to NMEA mode. It seems that the gps-mouse had permanently gone into binary mode. Research unveiled some information about hard-resetting the device by NMEA sentences. I also found some hints of binary sequences that could possibly reset the BU-313. But I am completely clueless how to send them to the device. I discovered one thread in this list back from 2012 <http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gpsd-users/2012-10/msg00005.html> and <http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gpsd-users/2012-02/msg00038.html> but this did not work for me.

 

So I kindly ask for help.

 

Regards

 

Peter

 

Peter Jenik, A-1220 Wien, Austria

+43 660 1433 717