Hi,
Just wondering if anyone has successfully hooked up a Garmin E-Trex to an XDA. It should be possible using the serial connector from both (null-modem!?!). If so what software was being used on the XDA.
Cheers
Jeff
Garmin eTrex - XDA
The eTrex and XDA make a great combination even with Pocket Streets: the eTrex gives you the vector to your destination and the XDA shows you where you are on the map at zilch cost. The draw back is that you can find your target destination on PStreets but there doesn't seem to be a way of extracting the coordinates to feed into your eTrex.
So I got the TomTom Citymap of London to try that out and after a poor user experience when the supplied gps driver locked the XDA up and I had to download another, plus no explanations of various 2.06 driver features plus finding that parts of the M25 London orbital were chopped off, I have the best of both worlds. It only cost me 10UKP.
Oh yes, connections. You can buy a TomTom power/gps cable for the XDA that is meant to take the TomTom gps mouse via a 4 connector phone type socket. So all you have to do is come up with a 4 connector phone type plug leading off to you eTrex. If you have the eTrex car cable for power and RS232, which you might want to use with a laptop, you will not want to cut this. So get a cheap RS232 cable and chop the appropriate end off for your phone type connection. Marry everything up, ignore the wife's complaints about wires and delayed departures while you fiddle with the eTrex and XDA, and you are off.
The TomTom cable phone socket housing can be taken apart briefly to check which are the Common, TX and Rx wires, and the tiny circuit board even tells you which is which. If you want I can give you the pin outs but at the risk of misinterpretation.
Etrex GPS
Managed to get it to work with Navigator and am well impressed.
Got a cable from http://pc-mobile.net/gps.htm. However had a few problems to start off with. The XDA ground to a halt (I have updated the ROM to the latest O2 release and apprently TomTom 1.4 has a problem with later version). Updated TomTom to 1.51 and still no joy. Change the interface from Garmin to IMEA 4800 baud on both GPS and TomTom and had a great weekend driving up and down the motorway and country roads in Derbyshire.
Jeff
Jeff,
Cool, isn't it! Perhaps you can enlighten me about Navigator. Not knowing much about TomTom I rather expected voice prompts on the citymap thingy I downloaded. Question: what do you have to do to get the voice prompts invoked (spend more money probably) and can you hear them from the XDA? :?:
Ken
Navigator Talking
I have Navigator 1.51 installed (downloaded from Tom Tom site) only you need at least a previous version as otherwise there are no maps.
When you do a route plan (rather than just have it in map mode), it does the "300 yards turn right......turn right.....find the next convenient place and turn round"
Not sure what happens with previous versions as I had 1.4ish on before and that interfered with Windows as I had upgraded PPC2002 to a newer version and it odesn't like that too well.
Cheers
Jeff
Hi guys, do you know if the connector for the Garmin Geko 201 is the same as the Etrex? I was looking at buying the Geko and the cable from the site listed above but they don't say specifically for the Geko. I put an email question in to the cable guys but you never know how long it will take to get an answer. It's definitely a flat connector and not a round pin type. Thanks - Jim
Hi,
I've bought a Fortuna U2 GPS receiver with an O2 XDA lead.
I've downloaded some software (GPSeasyCE), but when I try and connect to the GPS unit, I get "unable to open COM1".
Any suggestoins please?
I have tuned my keyboard driver to IR & serial, and I think I'm using the correct com port settings (4800bps, NMEA 0183).
I'd really like to just check that the hardware is working.
Can I download some free demo software that will do that?
What's best?
Thanks in advance, for any help anyone can offer,
Muddy
You have to turn off the IR port.
Muddy said:
Hi,
I've bought a Fortuna U2 GPS receiver with an O2 XDA lead.
I've downloaded some software (GPSeasyCE), but when I try and connect to the GPS unit, I get "unable to open COM1".
Any suggestoins please?
I have tuned my keyboard driver to IR & serial, and I think I'm using the correct com port settings (4800bps, NMEA 0183).
I'd really like to just check that the hardware is working.
Can I download some free demo software that will do that?
What's best?
Thanks in advance, for any help anyone can offer,
Muddy
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
disable your infra red port under setting, connections/beam, it will then work. A point about cables to work with gps, if you get a serial xda cable, and you also have a pc serial cable that links to your gps, all you need to do is get a 9 pin male to 9 pin male null modem adaptor, or make one, you need to join pin 2 on one to pin 3 on the other, pin 3 to pin 2 and pin 5 to pin 5, plug your xda lead one end, gps lead the other, and away you go.
I want to connect my Garmin Geko GPS to my PocketPC Phone Edition. It seems that regardless of what I do there's no receiving any data. It's only a three wire interface, so how hard can it be? The Geko puts out a NMEA format at 4800 baud, that's what the Pocket Streets application wants.
Q1: The Pocket Streets GPS Configuration screen shows that I have available COM2, COM3, COM8 and COM9. I thought I saw a COM1 in there before, but right now this is the list I see. Which COM port is wired to the connector?
Q2: I've heard that I may need to disable IR, a keyboard driver, or ??? to get this to accept input. Help out a newbie and tell me exactly how to turn off these features (it's not obvious to me).
Q3: I've loaded ZTerm on the PocketPC Phone Edition and used a serial cable to type back and forth with Hyperterminal on my XP system. This even down to 4800 baud. So I know it's possible to exchange data via serial port. Since it's only a three wire interface from the GPS, I've connected the Tx,Rx, and Gnd to the phone, but no data to the application or to ZTerm. I've tried tying the CTS, RTS and DSR lines together on the phone and made sure there was no handshaking, but still no data to ZTerm (or Pocket Streets). Wuzzup with this?
Thanks in advance! Bewildered with some cool toys :?
Ok I had a similar problem with TomTom.
Ok to disable IR go to Start/Settings the do to the connections.
Select Beam there should be a tick box labelled Receive all incoming beams.
Then go to pocket streets start it up and you should be able to select com1
Hope this helps, Just for information if the received all incoming beams is selected then it acts as your comm1, until this is de-selected you cant talk use the seial port on your bottom connecter.
Hi All,
I have bought a Fortuna U2 (PS2 connector) and matching cable to go into a O2 XDA (Wallaby). Nice little unit at a great price.
When I connect the two units up and check to see what messages I'm getting from the GPS, it is all random characters. I have tried reading both NMEA and SiRF settings - but still random characters.
I have later found out that this unit can do both NMEA and SiRF messages but it defaults at SiRF messages and I need NMEA to run my Navman software.
I have tried about 2467242 different programs on the PDA to try and get it to read the SiRF messages and then set the unit to run as NMEA GPS. Simply not working.
I have turned the IR port off and don't have an external keyboard. Is there something I'm missing ?
When I use a terminal software tool, I'm getting something through on COMM port 1, but it's absolute gibberish. I'm stumped.
Can anyone please tell me how to get the GPS unit to output NMEA messages by sending a command from the PDA to the GPS unit.
Cheers
Sonny
macsonny said:
Hi All,
I have bought a Fortuna U2 (PS2 connector) and matching cable to go into a O2 XDA (Wallaby). Nice little unit at a great price.
When I connect the two units up and check to see what messages I'm getting from the GPS, it is all random characters. I have tried reading both NMEA and SiRF settings - but still random characters.
I have later found out that this unit can do both NMEA and SiRF messages but it defaults at SiRF messages and I need NMEA to run my Navman software.
I have tried about 2467242 different programs on the PDA to try and get it to read the SiRF messages and then set the unit to run as NMEA GPS. Simply not working.
I have turned the IR port off and don't have an external keyboard. Is there something I'm missing ?
When I use a terminal software tool, I'm getting something through on COMM port 1, but it's absolute gibberish. I'm stumped.
Can anyone please tell me how to get the GPS unit to output NMEA messages by sending a command from the PDA to the GPS unit.
Cheers
Sonny
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
When using Tom TOm Navigator you'll have a GPS Terminal that allows you to change your baud rate. Try that. Use several baud rates on the com port. One of them should work. I think I use 9600 but I'm not sure.
regards
Ended up being a faulty cable. All fixed now.
Hello all.
I would like to know which GPS receiver is good for development. I would like to create my own applications based on GPS. Does Tom Tom allow that?
Thanks for any help
Hi (będę pisał po angielsku, coby inny mogli poczytać)
You mean TomTom hardware (GPS receiver) ?
It completely doesn't matter which GPS receiver you buy, as long as it's NMEA protocol (99% of sold receivers).
The only thing you need to take into consideration is connection interface.
USB -> bad... it's nice for a PC_ONLY GPS (harder for developer to get NMEA messages from USB)
RS232 -> better... all PC's have RS232 port, and it's really easy to develop applications to use RS-232 NMEA GPS
PS/2 -> so, so.. 5V PS/2 GPS can be connected to both PC and PDA (using PS/2 interface with PC can be hard though)
hybrid RS232 / PS2 -> best! (most serial GPS recevers work this way) You get both 12V signal for PC's RS232 and 5V signal for PDA
good hunting
Hi All
Thanks for creating such a great site - its become a total lifeline for me with my XDA.
I need some help on setting up my sat nav. I have Tom Tom 5 put on a 1gig SD card, and I'm using a fortuna GPS U2 receiver which has a USB connector one end, a connector to the PDA in the middle and a PS2 connector to the GPS antenna on the other end.
Been trying to configure it in Tom Tom, I know I need to set the baud rate to 4800 as per fortuna's website, but does anyone know what I should tell the system the GPS is connected to? I have a number of options:
Com9
Serial Cable on Com 1
Serial on USB
Infared Port
Serial cable on Com 2.
I've sat out in the car an played around but can't get it to pick up a signal and I'm ondering whether its me setting it up wrong that isn't helping.
Please...can anyone help me?
Simon
try this
on your phone go into settings then connections then beam and untick beam then in tomtom go into change preferences then show gps status then into configure select other gps receiver then select com1 try this if you search wallaby forum there is lots of post on this
jay
try this
on your phone go into settings then connections then beam and untick beam then in tomtom go into change preferences then show gps status then into configure select other gps receiver then select com1 try this if you search wallaby forum there is lots of post on this some of these cables don't work i got one off ebay said it would work but never had to change the wiring look at thishttp://wiki.xda-developers.com/index.php?pagename=Connectors
jay
Thanks Jay - after lots of swearing and soldering I have now reassigned the pins and so far all seems well. The only thing I'm not getting at the moment is audio out of the speaker - however I do get audio when the headset is connected. Does anyone have any ideas?
audio
turn the audio on in tomtom its in the settings