Ticklish Techs

Previously I wrote about geotagging and my photo tagging software PhotoTagStudio has build in support to tag photos with GPS coordinates from nmea files. I used to generate these nmea log files with a Windows CE PDA and imported the log files into my photos with PhotoTagStudio.

Now I bought a small GPS receiver with a build in datalogger. It’s named Wintec G-Rays 2 or WBT-201. And by the way: it is a great idea giving one product one or more name nobody can remember. For some reason Apple products always have only one name everybody can always remember. Back to my new WBT-201: it is very small, cost about 100 €, has a build in rechargeable battery and can be used as an ordinary Bluetooth GPS receiver. But besides this it can act as a GPS logger and store up to 130000 GPS positions.
I bought this device only for logging and combining these data with photos using PhotoTagStudio.

The software for configuring and getting the logged data is called Time Machine X and looks and acts like crap. It looks like written by an amateur programmer using Visual Basic 3 on Windows 3.11. But you need this software to configure the logger. I set it to capture every 2 seconds the position. That’s it. To use the logger you need only turn the power on and it’s working. With the track button you can record some waypoints at the given position but I didn’t use this feature.

To read the logs you can use Time Machine X, but I don’t like it and you cannot script this application. An alternative is the open source software GPS Babel. GPS Babel can read and write nearly every GPS related file format. So you can read the data directly from a serial COM port (this can be the USB or a Bluetooth connection to the WBT) and write it as a nmea file.

The following command reads from COM10 (this is a Bluetooth serial port an my computer) and writes a nmea file named out.nmea:
gpsbabel.exe -t -w -i wbt -f com10 -o nmea -F out.nmea

To delete the logged date from the WBT device you can use the following command:
gpsbabel.exe -t -w -i wbt,erase -f com10 -o nmea -F out.nmea

The -t parameter reads the whole logged track and the -w parameter reads the recorded waypoints.
The output file can be read by PhotoTagStudio v.6.2 and above and other software that is capable of reading nmea files. Or you can use GPS Babel to create files with other formats. For example kml files for Google Earth and Google Maps.

Now is only one thing missing: a display device for the GPS date and status when I am not caring my PDA or notebook with me. In will write another article where I will show how to use a mobile phone to display the data of a Bluetooth GPS receiver.