NaviLink for Linux
As you already know, I own a NaviGPS with which I'm very happy. There was only one dark spot: no Linux support. Locosys (which seems to be the real manufacturer, the device is branded by different companies) provides a utility to down- and upload tracks, routes and waypoints for Windows only and my previous attempts to understand the protocol weren't successful.
But yesterday I received a PDF document from Roger Liou at Locosys who saw my previous work at my Wiki1). The document contained the specifications of the NaviLink protocol.
With this kind of help I were finally able to write the first version of a Perl NaviLink client today. While doing so I discovered quite a few errors in the document, so I transfered the contents to a new Wiki page while fixing some of the specs. There are probably some more errors in it, because I haven't implemented the full protocol, yet.
Anyway, for everyone who wants to try it, here is the script:
It's a single Perl script only dependent on Device::SerialPort. It's licensed under the BSD license, so feel free to do whatever you want with it.
Currently only tracklog downloads are supported. Feel free to improve the script by sending patches 
Update: I added a few more modes. The link above always points to the most up to date version, before sending any patches make sure you have a recent release.
Update 2: The script now has a proper project page. Uploading waypoints is finished as well.
- Digg this post
- Save to del.icio.us
- Subscribe to my feed
- Stumble it
- Leave a comment
- Follow me on identi.ca
Comments
2Good catch with the comparisons! I did so much PHP coding in the last months that I have a hard time remembering to think of the difference between ne and !=.
3If I were to start to create a GUI to front this code are there any preferences at to which library to use. My initial thoughts are to use Tk, unless anyone has strong feelings about it.
Dave
4
567Thanks for all this work, especially the early reverse engineering, which I know from experience (writing firmware uploader for my USB MP3 player) is the frustrating part.
8has a fix which Works For Me™ to fix a problem I found where the second half of the trackpoints wouldn't stay deleted. I found that the 'delete' feature overwrites 4096 trackpoints with 0xFF, but there are 8192 trackpoints in total, so I added a patch which calls the same delete routine again with a different memory offset. There might be other ways to achieve the same effect, but this worked for me so far.
10
11
12There is hope for me, though, as the current beta firmware for NaviGPS supports dumping waypoints to the SD card. Trouble is, it appears to be some binary format that I haven't the knowledge to work out how to read.
I can supply a test file if anyone feels the need to have a go. Else looks like I'm stuck for a bit.
Thanks for your efforts!
13florian@migdal:/opt$ perl ./navilink.pl gettp
Timeout while reading. Last bytes where 'b0 b3 '.
Failed to start the communication. Did you enable the NaviLink mode?
same is for navilink.pl info. I'm using a Testing Firmware: V1.61(B0608T). Any hint what i'm doing wrong? Thanks in advance!
14I haven't tested the script with your firmware version, yet. Maybe Locosys changed something in the communication protocol.
15
161) the device is /dev/tty.usbserial0 not /dev/ttyUSB0
2) It only works once after that I get:
"chris$ ./navilink.pl -d /dev/tty.usbserial0 info
Timeout while reading. Last bytes where ''.
Failed to start the communication. Did you enable the NaviLink mode?"
(although sometimes with different last bytes), untill I unplug and replug the usb cable (is this related to florians issue above?). Yes it is in NaviLink mode ;)
3) The lat and lon data is garbage. I suspect this is byte order problem somewhere.
1 and 2 I can live with, I may try and fix 3, or I may just use a sensible computer instead.
17Blog
Older Weblog articles are available in the Archive, subscribe to the
Full Content RSS Feed
to stay tuned. (learn more)
Recent Blog Entries
This is the personal web site of Andreas Gohr
- human being, blogger and web geek from Berlin, Germany.
This page was last updated at
2007/04/27 10:38.
Imprint/Impressum
Tagged at del.icio.us:
No tags, yet. Why don't you bookmark it?
Most popular:
Recent readers:
Very very nice. Just what we needed (we have 10 of these devices and would really like to be able to use then under linux. I had to make several changes, you can get my version here:
http://kleptog.org/temp/navili … k-fixed.pl
The biggest issue was with the packet reading. Just because a packet ends with b0b3 doesn't mean whenever you see that it's the end of the packet. My trackpoint data happened to contain those two bytes. I fixed that, as well as many other warnings general.
Have a nice day,