RE: Linux connection with Lowrance Airmap 100?

["Curtis L. Olson" <curt@infoplane.com>]

Amos Shapira writes:
> Thanks, but I was looking more at the other way around - i.e. create
> a land map on a PC (under Linux, using scanned maps if possible) and
> be able to UPLOAD it into the GPS, because that's the most I can
> take with me for a flight or a drive or a hike.

This may be a bit far fetched, and I have no idea what sort of image
format or map scale you need for your GPS, but here goes ...

One of the people involved with flight gear has done some interesting
work with generating maps from the flight gear scenery.  He's written
a perl script that parses the flight gear scenery format, and then
uses GD (I think) to create the output images.  The results look very
nice, but the whole process is very slow.  Here are some example
images:

    http://heron.itep.ru/~anovikov/fgfs/

This probably isn't the scale you are interested in for hiking :-) but
the flight gear scenery has fairly accurate terrain (3 arc-sec dem
based) for the USA ...

The perl script could probably be modified pretty easily to include
other types of data you might have on hand that you'd be interested in
representing in your map.

> Also, it looks like Lowrance are open enough to document their serial
> protocol (LSI-100, IIRC), but as far as I skimmed through it it
> doesn't describe a way to upload maps.
>
> Maybe I'll run the IMS under DOSEMU/Wine/VMware and sniff the serial
> line (maybe the only positive point about having this program use DOS
> interfaces :-)

I've done some really basic work in generating NMEA gps output.  It
probably wouldn't be too hard to flip this around and write a parser
for the basic NMEA strings.

My application was to have my flight sim fake NMEA gps output for the
current "virtual" position, and then hook this into some real
commercial moving-map type software.  Actually worked amazingly well.

This probably doesn't help in figuring out how to upload an image to
your gps, but it is my only gps communication experience so I thought
I'd mention it.

Regards,

Curt.
--
Curtis Olson   University of MN, ME Dept.       Flight Gear Project
Twin Cities    curt@me.umn.edu                  curt@flightgear.org
Minnesota      http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt   http://www.flightgear.org
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