User talk:Biketool

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Your GPS Edits (12/2013)

Hi & welcome! Thanks for taking the time to contribute to the FlightGear wiki. However, please note that the edits you made are not exactly documenting existing features, also the article itself is not about feature requests. Obviously, it's great if you are working on these features already - if so, please state so. But if these are just feature requests without any intention to work on them, I suggest to check out the issue tracker to file your feature requests there. Your ideas do sound useful, and I agree that these would be great additions to FlightGear. The GPS code is currently being actively developed and maintained - however, please keep in mind that things like bluetooth access are highly OS-specific, and thus not easily supported by cross-platform software like FlightGear. In fact, for the same reasons, FlightGear still is lacking USB HID Support too. Regarding the use-cases you mentioned, this can already be accomplished by using FlightGear's extensive I/O facilities and using it as a GPS sensor in other software (obviously, minus the bluetooth connectivity). Feel free to get in touch via the forums to discuss your ideas. HTH --Hooray (talk) 09:43, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, I am using the Linux FLightgear and hope to build a quick and dirty module that will probably only work for Linux, so as I make my notes I thought I would drop it into the wiki. Perhaps GPS internals is a better location. I am currently working on creating the dummy 'device' I think GPS data follows the same NEMA protocol(rs-232 serial) as a cable but sent over bluetooth.Biketool (talk) 10:18, 25 December 2013 (UTC)
I would suggest to check out the USB HID Support discussion in the issue tracker. It may be a good idea to use a wrapper library like hidapi here (also has BT support) to get started more quickly and to come up with a multi-platform implementation right from the beginning. For quick prototyping, you could use Nasal's CppBind framework, which makes it straightforward to add scripting bindings to FlightGear (should only take 20 minutes to expose the most essential APIs for quick testing). However, ideally USB/HID (and Bluetooth) support would be added at the I/O layer in FG/SG, i.e. somewhere around FGProtocol or even better SGIOChannel. As can be seen in ticket #619, there's also the idea of mapping the API into the property tree using SGPropertyChangeListener. For detailed information on adding new subsystems or listener-based subsystems, check out Howto:Create new subsystems. Ultimately, it's obviously up to you - but these are the most relevant pointers. --Hooray (talk) 11:01, 25 December 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, better to start out doing it right and not have to rewrite. I need to find some information to create the simulated bluetooth device first.Biketool (talk) 11:52, 25 December 2013 (UTC)
The terms you're probably looking for are "bluetooth HID emulator" or "emulate bluetooth device" - there are a few open source projects doing similar stuff. there are also some projects emulating a GPS dongle over bluetooth (most of them using Python or Java [1], [2]). --Hooray (talk) 12:17, 25 December 2013 (UTC)