Re: gpsd with python project

[Greg Troxel]

Al Grant <bigal.nz@gmail.com> writes:

> Hello,
>
> I am looking to get started with gpsd and python - but before I go too
> far I am hopeful that some of the people here can confirm my thinking.
>
> My setup is a RaspPI, USB GPS (Ublox based) and Python - I am however
> doing the development on Windows 10.

My advice is buy another Pi and develop on it.

> The python project is to do with wildlife tracking for conservation
> and running on a RaspPi will be a payload on a drone - every few
> seconds I am expecting the python code on the drone to meet certain
> conditions and record a location with some meta data.

Out of scope for gpsd, but you really should understand your power,
weight and battery budget.

> It seems like I could program python to work with the gps directly
> (yuck), there may be other python gps libs, or I could run gpsd.

That is not confused.   See also

https://github.com/semuconsulting/pyubx2
https://github.com/semuconsulting/PyGPSClient

which is ubx only I think, but you don't need to handle dozens of rx types.

> Is gpsd designed to be an easy interface for programmers to work with?

yes, that's that point.

> Only drawback I see at this point is I won't be able to develop with
> it on my windows PC?

That's a feature if it gets you off windows :-)

> As an aside does anyone know of a good lib for plotting points on a
> map in python and some very light geospatial work like like
> intersection?

qgis



But seriously, consider a microcontroller that is less than a Pi, and
writing arduino code to log, to reduce size/weight/power.

(I'm done with this thread now.)