Database Develop

Garmin e-Trex GPS -> XDA

Hi,
Just wondering if anyone has successfully hooked up a Garmin E-Trex to an XDA. It should be possible using the serial connector from both (null-modem!?!). If so what software was being used on the XDA.
Cheers
Jeff

Garmin eTrex - XDA
The eTrex and XDA make a great combination even with Pocket Streets: the eTrex gives you the vector to your destination and the XDA shows you where you are on the map at zilch cost. The draw back is that you can find your target destination on PStreets but there doesn't seem to be a way of extracting the coordinates to feed into your eTrex.
So I got the TomTom Citymap of London to try that out and after a poor user experience when the supplied gps driver locked the XDA up and I had to download another, plus no explanations of various 2.06 driver features plus finding that parts of the M25 London orbital were chopped off, I have the best of both worlds. It only cost me 10UKP.
Oh yes, connections. You can buy a TomTom power/gps cable for the XDA that is meant to take the TomTom gps mouse via a 4 connector phone type socket. So all you have to do is come up with a 4 connector phone type plug leading off to you eTrex. If you have the eTrex car cable for power and RS232, which you might want to use with a laptop, you will not want to cut this. So get a cheap RS232 cable and chop the appropriate end off for your phone type connection. Marry everything up, ignore the wife's complaints about wires and delayed departures while you fiddle with the eTrex and XDA, and you are off.
The TomTom cable phone socket housing can be taken apart briefly to check which are the Common, TX and Rx wires, and the tiny circuit board even tells you which is which. If you want I can give you the pin outs but at the risk of misinterpretation.

Etrex GPS
Managed to get it to work with Navigator and am well impressed.
Got a cable from http://pc-mobile.net/gps.htm. However had a few problems to start off with. The XDA ground to a halt (I have updated the ROM to the latest O2 release and apprently TomTom 1.4 has a problem with later version). Updated TomTom to 1.51 and still no joy. Change the interface from Garmin to IMEA 4800 baud on both GPS and TomTom and had a great weekend driving up and down the motorway and country roads in Derbyshire.
Jeff

Jeff,
Cool, isn't it! Perhaps you can enlighten me about Navigator. Not knowing much about TomTom I rather expected voice prompts on the citymap thingy I downloaded. Question: what do you have to do to get the voice prompts invoked (spend more money probably) and can you hear them from the XDA? :?:
Ken

Navigator Talking
I have Navigator 1.51 installed (downloaded from Tom Tom site) only you need at least a previous version as otherwise there are no maps.
When you do a route plan (rather than just have it in map mode), it does the "300 yards turn right......turn right.....find the next convenient place and turn round"
Not sure what happens with previous versions as I had 1.4ish on before and that interfered with Windows as I had upgraded PPC2002 to a newer version and it odesn't like that too well.
Cheers
Jeff

Hi guys, do you know if the connector for the Garmin Geko 201 is the same as the Etrex? I was looking at buying the Geko and the cable from the site listed above but they don't say specifically for the Geko. I put an email question in to the cable guys but you never know how long it will take to get an answer. It's definitely a flat connector and not a round pin type. Thanks - Jim

Hi,
I've bought a Fortuna U2 GPS receiver with an O2 XDA lead.
I've downloaded some software (GPSeasyCE), but when I try and connect to the GPS unit, I get "unable to open COM1".
Any suggestoins please?
I have tuned my keyboard driver to IR & serial, and I think I'm using the correct com port settings (4800bps, NMEA 0183).
I'd really like to just check that the hardware is working.
Can I download some free demo software that will do that?
What's best?
Thanks in advance, for any help anyone can offer,
Muddy

You have to turn off the IR port.
Muddy said:
Hi,
I've bought a Fortuna U2 GPS receiver with an O2 XDA lead.
I've downloaded some software (GPSeasyCE), but when I try and connect to the GPS unit, I get "unable to open COM1".
Any suggestoins please?
I have tuned my keyboard driver to IR & serial, and I think I'm using the correct com port settings (4800bps, NMEA 0183).
I'd really like to just check that the hardware is working.
Can I download some free demo software that will do that?
What's best?
Thanks in advance, for any help anyone can offer,
Muddy
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

disable your infra red port under setting, connections/beam, it will then work. A point about cables to work with gps, if you get a serial xda cable, and you also have a pc serial cable that links to your gps, all you need to do is get a 9 pin male to 9 pin male null modem adaptor, or make one, you need to join pin 2 on one to pin 3 on the other, pin 3 to pin 2 and pin 5 to pin 5, plug your xda lead one end, gps lead the other, and away you go.

GPS for the PocketPC Phone Edition

I want to connect my Garmin Geko GPS to my PocketPC Phone Edition. It seems that regardless of what I do there's no receiving any data. It's only a three wire interface, so how hard can it be? The Geko puts out a NMEA format at 4800 baud, that's what the Pocket Streets application wants.
Q1: The Pocket Streets GPS Configuration screen shows that I have available COM2, COM3, COM8 and COM9. I thought I saw a COM1 in there before, but right now this is the list I see. Which COM port is wired to the connector?
Q2: I've heard that I may need to disable IR, a keyboard driver, or ??? to get this to accept input. Help out a newbie and tell me exactly how to turn off these features (it's not obvious to me).
Q3: I've loaded ZTerm on the PocketPC Phone Edition and used a serial cable to type back and forth with Hyperterminal on my XP system. This even down to 4800 baud. So I know it's possible to exchange data via serial port. Since it's only a three wire interface from the GPS, I've connected the Tx,Rx, and Gnd to the phone, but no data to the application or to ZTerm. I've tried tying the CTS, RTS and DSR lines together on the phone and made sure there was no handshaking, but still no data to ZTerm (or Pocket Streets). Wuzzup with this?
Thanks in advance! Bewildered with some cool toys :?

Ok I had a similar problem with TomTom.
Ok to disable IR go to Start/Settings the do to the connections.
Select Beam there should be a tick box labelled Receive all incoming beams.
Then go to pocket streets start it up and you should be able to select com1
Hope this helps, Just for information if the received all incoming beams is selected then it acts as your comm1, until this is de-selected you cant talk use the seial port on your bottom connecter.

Bluetooth problems from a newbie

I have recently "upgraded" from xdaII to xdaIIs and I'm having a few problems. I have upgraded the BT stack to 3500 but I still can seem to connect to my tomtom gps. Device sees it but tomtom 3 cant. I'm completely confused by the connection wizard- none of the profiles seems to fit gps. I also dont seem to be able to send or receive files from my old xdaII. What am I doing wrong?
I'm also a little confused about roms. Do I need to upgrade my rom? Is there a simple way avoiding anything too technical (I've read about "country codes" and other wierd stuff). My current config is:
ROM: 1.12.62
Radio: 1.02.00
Protocol: 1337.32
ExtROM: 1.12.178
Could someone please help! I only have a few days to decide if I want to keep it or stick with my xdaII...

Gps's use the serial profile to transmit the data over - its like a virtual serial connection - so you need to tell tomtom to look on a com port AFAIK,.
For eample in my Tomtom list of connections there is one called 'BT on Com6, ' which is the bluetooth comport on my unit.
But there are also listed more com ports...
Com5
Com4
Bluetooth Serial port Com7
The XDA only actually has 1 com port (com1) so any other are virtual ports created by various software, you just need to find out which one is the one for the GPS...

So in "tomtom gps v3.07" I go to the gps tab and by default its set to infrared port. I change to "BT on com6" and click OK. When I restart the program it always resets to "infrared port" even if I try a different port. Really am stuck- never had any problems with my xdaII- just put in BT port and it picked it up automatically...

The problem is it's not always the same com port for different devices - firstly does your unit have the widcoom stack version of are you on the microsoft stack..
Whichever you have you need to find where the BT com port is configured..
On my widcomm i go to 'bluetooth setting' ; 'services' ; "serial port'; 'advanced'
in there it says...
inbound com port : 6
outbound com port : 7
so the incoming com port on my bluetooth is 6 hence the 'BT com port on 6' listed in my tomtom gps.
so you need to find your BLuetooth com port and find out which com port number it is set to. Not sure as to why tomtom gps does not save your settings, the only thing I can think of is becuase it never gets a valid signal from the comport select, and does not save the change unless it does.
Also: I assume the gps unti has a pairing with your XDA unit?

So does the widcom stack work on the xdaIIs? If so where can get it?

Sorry: I cannot be certiain the widcomm works with the IIs, but is can be downloaded from this site if you are willling to try, just do a search oin widcoom, and you will find a lot of entries...
For the MS BT stack; look under start, settings,System tab. There is a icon labeleld Bluetooth settings in there you can see/set the com ports for the bluetooth link. they also need to be enabled witch a check box before they will work...

So on "bluetooth seetings" serial port/advanced I have inbound COM port 5 and Outbound COM port 6. Below it says "Default device for outgoing serial connections: TomTom Wireless GPS. Display the device selection screen the next time an outgoing serial connection is attempted" next to a ticked box. I have tried bt com 5 and 6 in the gps settings and it wont save or recognise either. I can, however, pair and connect to the device in my BT manager but Tomtom doesnt recognise it...

Hmmm - all sound ok to me but I currently use a wired GPS, so I have not actually done it. I'm afraid I'm as stuk as you are now...

Sorry bro- I have sorted this now. Thanks...

For me, I just selected Comm 5 from the GPS status drop down and it works like magic!

GPS Reveiver issues

Hi All
Thanks for creating such a great site - its become a total lifeline for me with my XDA.
I need some help on setting up my sat nav. I have Tom Tom 5 put on a 1gig SD card, and I'm using a fortuna GPS U2 receiver which has a USB connector one end, a connector to the PDA in the middle and a PS2 connector to the GPS antenna on the other end.
Been trying to configure it in Tom Tom, I know I need to set the baud rate to 4800 as per fortuna's website, but does anyone know what I should tell the system the GPS is connected to? I have a number of options:
Com9
Serial Cable on Com 1
Serial on USB
Infared Port
Serial cable on Com 2.
I've sat out in the car an played around but can't get it to pick up a signal and I'm ondering whether its me setting it up wrong that isn't helping.
Please...can anyone help me?
Simon

try this
on your phone go into settings then connections then beam and untick beam then in tomtom go into change preferences then show gps status then into configure select other gps receiver then select com1 try this if you search wallaby forum there is lots of post on this
jay

try this
on your phone go into settings then connections then beam and untick beam then in tomtom go into change preferences then show gps status then into configure select other gps receiver then select com1 try this if you search wallaby forum there is lots of post on this some of these cables don't work i got one off ebay said it would work but never had to change the wiring look at thishttp://wiki.xda-developers.com/index.php?pagename=Connectors
jay

Thanks Jay - after lots of swearing and soldering I have now reassigned the pins and so far all seems well. The only thing I'm not getting at the moment is audio out of the speaker - however I do get audio when the headset is connected. Does anyone have any ideas?

audio
turn the audio on in tomtom its in the settings

GPS antenna

I've recently purchased an EverMore GM-R900 GPS receiver, connected to the 750v serial port through a mini-DIN adapter (which also includes power input from the car adapter). The question is : how do I map the serial (data) to make it available to other apps (other than active sync, which seems to be the only user of the serial...) ? I tried with GPS Gate but unsuccessfully, I cant find the correct source. Has anybody experienced something similar, yet? Perhaps with some carholder with integrated gps?

UP! C'mon.....is there a way? I've also tried with gpsgate but maybe I'm using the wrong parameters....... I've tried (from WM gps config) to map every port but I'm not getting a thing on any of them. The antenna itself seems to be working.

Still No GPS Device Found
Hi Guys,
Thanks in advance, i have gone through this site numerous times but still haven't been able to get my TomTom working on my new Treo750 and Ox-XDA IIs both running WM6.
I have GPS receiver in my cradle which works like a jam on my previous Treo650 (Running PalmOS). But since upgrading to this WM device it has become a night mare can't get it right particularly the way windows is handling com ports.
Can any one please guide me on how to get it going as I don't have PDA with in-build GPS receiver nor bluetooth receiver only this serial connected receiver.
Thanks
Nilesh

not sure i understood
If you have the tom tom software from your 650 and you are trying to use it on wm6 ,it is more than liely a software problem.
i have tom tom running on my 750,with a sirfstar 3 bluetooth gps unit, with no problems but the software came with the device.
If I am not mistaken tom tom allow you a device change every so often, in which case you will be able to download the correct software for your device.