Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology
Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile and Internet service technologies.
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Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Fun with GPS
Update: I rewrote the note when I got it working.
I bought the Nokia LD-3W (a GPS/Bluetooth module) to location-enable a few of my existing MIDlets, and as an idea generator for new applications and services.
It supports NMEA over Bluetooth Serial Port, so it can be used with most mobile phones, and also with most location/mapping applications for Java, Symbian or Windows Mobile. I intend to access it directly via Bluetooth from Java, as there are yet hardly any phones with the Location API. The same implementation should in theory work with all similar GPS modules.
It works flawlessly with Mobile GMaps, an excellent (and free) mapping application, but the example code I found hardly worked at all and contained lots of obvious bugs, including such provided by phone manufacturers (I won't name names).
GPS is not intended for indoor use (the satellite signals are too weak), but it could actually track position to a certain extent, yet sometimes it lost the satellite link completely.
Outdoors it tracked my position very exactly while walking around, and Mobile GMaps updated the display every few seconds.
The module only communicates with one phone at a time, so once an application starts communicating it's invisible to other phones.
If you plan to buy this module (that's certainly one of the smaller, better and less expensive ones around), note that it only comes with a car charger. If you don't have a Nokia phone you can of course buy a separate charger for something like $15 over the Internet. Don't buy the charger in a shop. They'll rob you blind (more than double the price, where I checked).
I bought the Nokia LD-3W (a GPS/Bluetooth module) to location-enable a few of my existing MIDlets, and as an idea generator for new applications and services.
It supports NMEA over Bluetooth Serial Port, so it can be used with most mobile phones, and also with most location/mapping applications for Java, Symbian or Windows Mobile. I intend to access it directly via Bluetooth from Java, as there are yet hardly any phones with the Location API. The same implementation should in theory work with all similar GPS modules.
It works flawlessly with Mobile GMaps, an excellent (and free) mapping application, but the example code I found hardly worked at all and contained lots of obvious bugs, including such provided by phone manufacturers (I won't name names).
GPS is not intended for indoor use (the satellite signals are too weak), but it could actually track position to a certain extent, yet sometimes it lost the satellite link completely.
Outdoors it tracked my position very exactly while walking around, and Mobile GMaps updated the display every few seconds.
The module only communicates with one phone at a time, so once an application starts communicating it's invisible to other phones.
If you plan to buy this module (that's certainly one of the smaller, better and less expensive ones around), note that it only comes with a car charger. If you don't have a Nokia phone you can of course buy a separate charger for something like $15 over the Internet. Don't buy the charger in a shop. They'll rob you blind (more than double the price, where I checked).
