带有 Windows 驱动程序的串行 USB 设备。 想在linux下使用

Question

I have a GPS unit I can connect with USB, which is said by the manufacturer to be used with Windows. It has a CD with some drivers. Something about USB to Serial PL2303.

But I need to be able to use it with linux and python. How can I go on about trying to achieve this? Is it a lost cause when I have no documentation from manufacturer about which registers to read and such?

When I connect it is being recognized in dmesg, it gets a name /dev/ttyUSB1 What is the next step in trying to get this to work?

Answer 1

The easiest way to do this is to use gpsd to read the data from the device. gpsd will automatically parse the messages from the GPS device and give you back the important information. There are already Python bindings for you to get the information back, or you can fall back onto calling the C library from Python if that is required.

If you want to parse it yourself, it's likely the device is giving you out NMEA 0183 data. The most likely default settings are going to be 4800-8-N-1 or 9600-8-N-1 . The easiest way that I have found to check devices such as this is to use GTKTerm to open up the serial port and see if the data is coming back properly. Here's some sample data from a GPS receiver from USGlobalSat, running at 4800bps:

$GPGGA,,,,,,0,00,,,M,0.0,M,,0000*48
$GPGSA,M,1,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,*12
$GPGSV,3,1,12,01,00,000,,02,00,000,,03,00,000,,04,00,000,*7C
$GPGSV,3,2,12,05,00,000,,06,00,000,,07,00,000,,08,00,000,*77
$GPGSV,3,3,12,09,00,000,,10,00,000,,11,00,000,,12,00,000,*71
$GPRMC,,V,,,,,,,,,,N*53