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gps-share

Utility to share your GPS device on local network.

Git master build status: Build Status

Goals

gps-share has two goals:

  • Share your GPS device on the local network so that all machines in your home or office can make use of it.
  • Enable support for standalone (i-e not part of a cellular modem) GPS devices in Geoclue. Since Geoclue has been able to make use of network NMEA sources since 2015, gps-share works out of the box with Geoclue.

The latter means that it is a replacement for GPSD and Gypsy. While "why not GPSD?" has already been documented, Gypsy has been unmaintained for many years now. I did not feel like reviving a dead project and I really wanted to code in Rust so I decided to create gps-share.

Screenshot of gps-share in action

Dependencies

The developers use the latest rustc release and if you use an older version of the compiler, you may encounter issues. While cargo manages the Rust crates gps-share depend on, you'll also need the following on your host:

  • libdbus
  • libudev
  • libcap
  • xz-libs

Supported devices

gps-share currently only supports GPS devices that present themselves as serial port (RS232). Many USB are expected to work out of the box but bluetooth devices need manual intervention to be mounted as serial port devices through rfcomm command. The following command worked on my Fedora 25 machine for a TomTom Wireless GPS MkII.

sudo rfcomm connect 0 00:0D:B5:70:54:75

gps-share can autodetect the device to use if it's already mounted as a serial port but it assumes a baudrate of 38400. You can manually set the device node to use by passing the device node path as argument and set the baudrate using the '-b' commandline option. For example for the TomTom Wireless GPS MkII device, you'll nee to set the baudrate to 115200.

Pass '--help' for a full list of supported commandline options.

Permisions

gps-share will need read and write access to device nodes. Adding your user to 'dialout' group gives you this access for USB devices on Fedora hosts but it is not the case for the /dev/rfcomm0 device created by the above mentioned command. For those devices, you'll either need to run gps-share as root or set permission on /dev/rfcomm0.

Supported operating systems

gps-share is targetted specifically for Linux. It may or may not work on other POSIX hosts. Patches to add/fix support for non-Linux systems, are more than welcome.

Remember to configure your firewall to allow your service to be reachable on the local network, as needed.

Building from source

Just like most Rust projects, gps-share uses cargo build system so building is as simple as:

cargo build

Once built, binary is in target/debug/gps-share. If you want to build gps-share for production use, with all optimizations:

cargo build --release

which puts the binary in target/release/gps-share. You can also run the binary directly (without building first):

cargo run

If you need to pass any arguments or options to the commandline, you do:

cargo run -- [ARGUMENT1 [ARGUMENT2 [..]]]

To see all supported options and arguments, run:

cargo run -- --help

License

gps-share is licensed under GNU GPLv2+. Please refer to LICENCE file for details.

Hardware donations

If you'd like some particular devices supported by gps-share, I do accept hardware donations. Please contact through email (on my github profile & git commits) to request my postal address to send the hardware to. If you can send through DHL, use the following address:

DHL customer: 904 538 947 DHL Packstation 179 Germany

PLEASE NOTE: This address only works if you send through DHL.

Thanks.