eXplorist live tracking on Mac?

[Parsa]

Has anyone figured out a way to get their Mac to track the NMEA date from the eXplorist? As far as i can see, there are still no stupid drivers that work.

 

USB computer, USB receiver, but they can't talk. What's up with that Magellan?

 

Parsa

[robertlipe]

Magellan actually got this right. Explorist, when configured for NMEA mode, appears as a conforming USB CDC device. This means you just pop it into your Mac, Linux, Solaris, UnixWare, OpenServer, or other system and it appears as a modem-like substance.

 

I just plugged an X600 configured for that mode into a PPC Mini running 10.3.7. /dev/cu.usbmodem3B11 dutifully reports NMEA sentences to any application that cares to listen.

rjlpmac:~/src/gpsbabel.virgin robertl$ ./gpsbabel -i nmea,get_posn -f /dev/cu.usbmodem3B11  -o geo -F -
<?xml version="1.0"?><loc version="1.0" src="EasyGPS">
<waypoint>
<name id="Position"><![CDATA[Position]]></name>
<coord lat="35.824878" lon="-86.847113"/>
</waypoint>
</loc>

OK, that's probably not what you had in mind, but you get the idea.

 

So anything you can find for Mac that expects NMEA on serial should Just Work. No aftermarket drivers or vendor-proprietary code required.

[arthurking83]

Hi Robert,

 

does this mean that the Xplorist will work on a USB host enabled PDA(such as my Toshiba E800) without the need for a driver?

 

apologies if this Q is off topic

[robertlipe]

If your Toshiba E800 supports USB CDC/ACM devices (and I have no idea if it does), yes.

[Parsa]

Why is it that MacGPS and GPSy (the new one for OS X) report that Magellan USB units don't work. I know that my old OS 9 version of GPSy doesn't see the unit. GPSBabel does of course. My old version of GPSy sees serial-to-usb Keyspan converters though.

 

MacGPS says that newer Garmin USB units work, but says the Magellan USB units don't. Possibly the web site is out of date. Can anyone report a raster map reader working with an eXplorist? If it does, I'd buy MacGPS. If I have to use my old Garmin 12XL, then I'll stick with my old version of GPSy.

 

Parsa

[robertlipe]

Now that's a different question. :-)

 

Perhaps they don't have the units for testing. Perhaps they demand NMEA senteneces that aren't supported. Perhaps they only support units if they can xfer waypoints AND realtime positioning info and they haven't updated their products to do this. Perhaps they don't see a market demand to bother, etc.

 

There are a lot of reasons why any given product may or may not support any given GPS. I just demonstrated the absence of "stupid drivers" for OS X for Explorist for NMEA output probably isn't a valid one. It's up to you and/or those vendors to eliminate the rest.

[Parsa]

Thanks Robert,

 

I wrote MacGPS a letter asking more clearly about their products compatibilty with Magellan USB units.

 

As I understand it. all these programs expect serial port data (or data through a serial-to-usb converter, or a driver that makes the USB port emulate a serial port). I expect that the programs can't yet handle usb-to-usb, which they better get onto considering all current computers and GPS receivers.

 

So far, I've not received any replies saying anyone here has been able to use one of the raster programs with a USB Magellan.

 

Parsa

[robertlipe]

If they're expecting NMEA sentences to show up on a "serial port" (and the Magellan CDC-ACM is no more or less really a serial port than any of the various USB->Serial adapters on the market - indeed, most of the hockey puck products are exactly this...) they won't know the difference whether the adapter/driver/emulation is inside the GPS & OS-provided drivers or whether it's inside a $10 dongle with a vendor driver.

 

When I look at their page, I'll say only that I'd be very suprised if an Explorist in NMEA mode doesn't work exactly like, say, a Bluetooth receiver. But I'm not their tech support department. :-)