Most GPS devices are compatible with NMEA sentences, we can use the serial comm port or a socket to bring these sentences and parse them. I can do it but i dont know too much about phyton, so if you help me get started with phyton, just to be able to open the source of Gmapcatcher and modify i think i can help you.

Thanks...

A few links to get you started:

This is a starting point if you are in MS windows: http://code.google.com/p/gmapcatcher/wiki/devEnv

GMapCatcher Source documentation: http://gmapcatcher.googlecode.com/svn/doxygen/html/index.html

You should also read about GPSd: http://gpsd.berlios.de/

Please post your findings in  Issue 57 : http://code.google.com/p/gmapcatcher/issues/detail?id=57

Before I buy a USB GPS device I would like to test if my GMapsCatcher installation on eeebuntu works correctly. I am attempting this with gpsfake and a NMEA log file I downloaded. The GMapsCatcher gui brings up the GPS options but does not place a marker on the map or move the map. Any ideas? The reason I wanted to test it first is that the markers option in GMApsCatcher does not work with me - the marker is so big it covers much of the UK. I haven't figures out yet how to change this in the source code...

Hi cjreeve,

You are entering uncharted territory, I have no idea how "gpsfake" works, I guess you could open a new issue about that.

The markers are all images (marker.png, marker_gps.png) you could edit them to something else just keep the same dimensions.

Hi, talking to you enabled me to figure out my problem. It was that I was running gmapscatcher via a soft link in my path that pointed to maps.py, so gmapscatcher was looking for the images in the directory that I ran it from. Perhaps I'll add the gmapscatcher director to my path directly which should solve the problem. Cheers.

Well, actually it only works if I start maps.py from the directory that images (that contains marker.png) is in. That is a bit inconvenient. Any idea if I can easily hard code the path to the image files by hand?

I see... You could create a shell script that launches the maps.py from the proper folder

#!/bin/bash
cd /home/me/working && python admin.py

If you still want to hard code the path to the images look in mapPixbuf.py http://code.google.com/p/gmapcatcher/source/browse/trunk/src/mapPixbuf.py

Thanks, the bash idea worked for starting it from the terminal, but not from my Cairo Dock. I tried modifying the code but I think I'd need to compile it after would? I have no idea how to do that, but if you tell me maybe I'll be able to play with other things such as automatically filling in the current coords in when creating a new marker...

Btw, I got gpsfake working. I just had a bad log file. It was great watching the GPS marker tracing someone's journey. I've ordered a USB sat nav dongle and can't wait to get lost in India where I'm heading. I hope GMapCatcher continues to envolve - I love it. Thanks helder!

I'm not familiar with the Cairo Dock, but it should let you add a "shortcut" to the bash script.

No need to recompile in python, just change the code and run it that's all. I guess that at some point we should create a Linux installer

gpsfake working! That is very kool.

Hello again helder,

First to let you know I got it all working - I had just made a typo in the path. I also got my eeebuntu working with a CVGI-B07 dongle and gpsd, but it wasn't easy. I had to use the -b option for gpsd otherwise it crashes the dongle, which it did, and had to use some SiRF software to reset it.

I have another problem with gmapcatcher. Please tell me if I should file a bug report: If I try to download any new maps, gmapcatcher downloads satellite images instead! This started happening on roughly 18 Sept. I tried a fresh install and temporarily moved .googlemaps so that it would be re-created but this did not help. I wonder if it is a change made by maps.google.com? Whether I choose to download maps or satellite images they all download from http://kmh[0-3].google.com/... Any ideas?

I could choose to use streetmaps instead I guess, the only problem is that they don't look as great and when I return to google mode and force them to update they don't update with googlemaps but with streetmaps. Because I can't figure out the system of how the tiles are saved I have no way of seperating my streetmap tiles from my google ones. I expect I'll have the same problem separating my satellite images from my maps. Any suggestion here?

Cheers, Chris.

Good that you have the GPS working!

Please fill in as many bugs as you find, it will be much better to keep them documented in the issues than here.

An added feature to put rectangle selection or curve selection to download the maps will be nice.Its little awkward to add height and width.