Rev and USB?

[Graham Samuel]

Thanks Ian for the reply. I had never heard of GPSBabel but I'm  
looking at it now- it looks like the way to go, provided I can find  
the manufacturer as you suggest.

To answer your question, the device is an 'own-label' device sold by  
a mainly French sports chain, Decathlon - they call it a 'Keymaze  
300', and it's made in Taiwan (not mainland China, surprisingly). I  
imagine it is a re-branding and the device (certainly its processor)  
will appear under other names elsewhere, but I have not yet done the  
research to pin this down. Note that this is not a full-blown GPS  
device in that one can't import waypoints into it so as to plan a  
route - it's what's called a 'training' device, which means that it  
records a route as you travel on it and then allows you to observe or  
extract the routing info at the end of the journey. Their wonderful  
trick (on the PC software) is to allow export of .kml files which can  
be fed directly into Google Earth in order to display your route.  
Google have put the .kml format into the public domain (it's a kind  
of xml) so there is a lot of potential there. My project would be  
related to existing geography-teaching applications... anyway I have  
now told you more than you want to know.

Thanks again for the intro to GPSBabel. I see I have a lot of work to  
do. Maybe the whole thing will crash and burn, but we'll see.

Graham

On Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:48:33 +0000, Ian Wood  
<revlist at azurevision.co.uk> wrote:

> Reading and writing to serial ports is supposed to be pretty easy in
> Rev (I've not actually done it), but USB is a LOT more complex.
>
> What GPS device is it? There are quite a few devices around where the
> manufacturer doesn't supply Mac software, but where you can download
> drivers from the manufacturers of the USB bridge in the device, then
> use third-party software such as GPSBabel.
>
> Ian
>
> On 22 Jan 2008, at 11:07, Graham Samuel wrote:
>
>> Can anyone give advice about how to go about making a Rev-developed
>> app talk to a USB interface? I'm thinking of writing something that
>> talks to a GPS device which has no Mac software available from the
>> manufacturer, but which can be linked to a PC via a USB cable. I am
>> out of touch with this kind of thing and can't easily work out how
>> hard it would be.
>>
>> TIA
>>
>> Graham


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Graham Samuel / The Living Fossil Co. / UK & France