NaviGPS

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NaviGPS unit
GT31 version
BGT-31 version

There are now quite a few OpenStreetMap users who own NaviGPS units. This is an owners page containing useful notes for these people. The different Names for this Device range from NaviGPS, NaviGPS-BT, Navi GT-11/BGT-11 (obsolete), Genie GT-31/BGT-31, Amaryllo, JJ-Connect Navigator 101/101BT. It was originally made by Scytex but the product and its engineering team have now transferred to Locosys. If you want to buy one, read the Merchandise page to give OSM a 10% donation for free. Also see NaviGPS for Linux.


Contents

Quick Start

This guide is for anyone who has never used a NaviGPS before and just wants to go out and record some tracks (assumes you have a memory card installed).

  1. If NaviGPS is brand new read the Setting Up section.
  2. Press the small button for two seconds to switch it on.
  3. Check that the messages CARD FOUND and NEW FILE come up.
  4. Hold it out in the sun, with a good view of the sky, for two or three minutes to get a fix. It will bleep and the light will flash when it has a fix. There will be a small 3D or 2D icon in the top right of the screen when it has a fix. Remain stationary until you get a fix.
  5. Go and make some tracks.
  6. Ensure that the unit always has a good view of the sky.
  7. If you lose your fix because of a tunnel or heavy tree cover, stop and wait for the fix to be regained once you have clear sky.
  8. To record a waypoint press and hold down the big button. The waypoint number will be displayed for a second or two.
  9. Write down the waypoint number and the name of the street or point of interest.
    1. If you are recording the name of a street, write something like "turning left into start of High Street" or "Bridge Road becomes Water Lane at this point".
    2. If you are recording a point of interest note the location relative to where the GPS is. "St Peter's Church on left hand side about 50m from the road" or "Pied Piper pub on right hand side".
  10. To switch off the unit press the small button and hold it down for several seconds.
  11. Once you have the NMEA format .TXT files from the SD card, you will need to convert the files to GPX for use with Josm or Openstreetmap or gpsbabel. Check out the NMEA page for instructions.
  12. The Navilink software (for Windows) captures your tracks and waypoints to a PC in NMEA, GPX and Google Earth KML format.
  13. The Amaryllo site has a good Getting Started guide.

Memory Cards

Not all memory cards work in a NaviGPS. The Locosys website states that the unit provides a 2.8 V supply to the card, so any card with an equal or lower minimum voltage should work.

Known to work

The following cards are known to work:

Known to NOT work

Troubleshooting

Disassembled BGT-31

Addenda

This was provided in an email from Scytex support):

Setting Up

The following notes relate to setting up a NaviGPS from new for use in making tracklogs:

General

Memory Card setup

Memory Card corruption

If you've arrived home to find that your SD card can't be read by your computer, there is a chance you can recover some files using PhotoRec. PhotoRec will scan through the card, ignoring the partition information, looking for file headers. It will produce some files that have been renamed with numbers (not original file names). A program like grep (for GNU/Linux) might help you sift through to find the resulting files. Try "grep 'dd,mm,yy' *txt" where dd, mm and yy are replaced by the day, month & year you're looking for respectively.

Such corruption has been known to occur using development firmware (B0608T) on a known good card model. Please stick to stable/formal firmware releases to avoid disappointment.

Retrieving data

There are several ways to obtain data from these devices.

Using NMEA files from an SD card

This usually is the easiest way. Set the device to log to files, then retrieve those files from the SD card. To convert them to GPX, use gpsbabel: 

 for i in *.TXT; do gpsbabel -i nmea -f $i -o gpx -F $i.gpx; done

Write internal datalog to SD card

If not using card to directly store data, or in case card gets corrupted, you can copy internal log contents to a card. This uses binary format. To convert such a file to GPS, again, use gpsbabel: 

 gpsbabel -t -i sbp -f FILE.SBP -o gpx -F out.gpx; cat out.gpx

Retrieve internal datalog directly

Additionally, you can retrieve internal datalog contents without using SD card. Again, gpsbabel comes to help... 

 gpsbabel -t -i navilink,datalog -f /dev/ttyUSBX -o gpx -F out3.gpx

Note that datalog part is important, otherwise only partial data is retrieved.

Make sure to use whichever ttyUSB device your device sits on. lsusb will list it as Prolific Technology, Inc. PL2303 Serial Port.

Updating Firmware

Under GNU/Linux

The firmware update software for Windows can be successfully run under GNU/Linux via Wine. If you haven't used Wine before, you'll want to read the introductory sections of the Wine User Guide.

Once Wine is installed, you need to configure the serial connection for Wine, see Wine User Guide: Serial & Parallel Ports. As the USB serial device names are of the form /dev/ttyUSBx, a typical system would require creating a symlink like this: 'ln -s /dev/ttyUSB0 ~/.wine/dosdevices/com1'.

Mounting

Helmet mounting for cycling

GPS mounted on back of helmet using velcro. Note string for safety.

The NaviGPS is light enough to be barely noticable when mounted on top of a cycling helmet. For track logging with occasional waypoint recording, this is quite an effective setup as it gives the unit the best view of the sky. To record a waypoint, you simply reach up and press the joystick till the beep is heard.

Velcro dots are sufficient to hold the unit, though you'd be wise to also add a string just in case.

Care


(B)GT-11

The Locosystech (B)GT-11 is identical to the Scytex NaviGPS and the predecessor of the (B)GT-31 (older SiRFstar chipset). In the Netherlands, it is known under the name Amaryllo Trip Tracker

A compact GPS with basic navigation capabilities and data logging. No facility to display a map.

The GPS performance seems to be acceptable. It emits a nice bleep sound and flashes a red light when it achieves satellite lock, which is nice and reassuring.

The unit is solid, well-constructed and quite compact. It is waterproof (useful if it rains, or for other forms of wet mapping) It contains a non-replaceable rechargeable Li-ion battery with a maximum life of 32 hours. The standard version comes with a car charger as standard. Both models have a USB connection for upload and recharging. The ability to recharge via the USB cable is a very nice feature. It also comes with a standard adapter for recharging from a car and the most compact and nifty 240 volt mains adapter I have ever seen.

The screen is small (33×21 mm; 128×64 pixels), but quite readable in daylight with mostly clear displays. The status symbols on the right of the screen (2D/3D, battery indicator, etc.) are quite small and hard to see (with my eyesight). The backlight is red, which is a bit unusual (maybe it's intended to preserve night-vision?). It is easy to accidentally set it permanently on, or permanently off, rather than the default auto-off mode.

It has only two buttons for operation — an On/Off/Escape button and a joystick-like button for menu navigation. The joystick can be operated, albeit a bit clumsily, while wearing thin gloves and riding a bicycle. Not sure if it would be possible while wearing very thick gloves, such as ski gloves.

The manual comes as a PDF document on a CD, or can be downloaded (see below). It is well written (for a Taiwanese user manual), and runs to 66 pages. The editor's introduction is written from the heart and is a nice touch.

It has all the standard basic GPS features — routes, waypoints and track-logs, but no map display. A trip meter is provided that is clearly designed for the cyclist. It also has configurable alerts for speed, altitude and destinations, which some people might find useful.

It comes with a simple Windows application for uploading/downloading routes, waypoints and trackpoints. Installation of the USB serial driver was a bit fiddly, but otherwise it works fine. In the software "Version 1.1 B20060228" there are two main download options (Oziexplorer/GPX/CSV and Waypoint+) in addition to the raw NMEA files. This software version also uses GPSBabel to export the data in KML format suitable for use with Google Maps and Google Earth. There is a backup/restore function which creates a 512k binary file which I suppose is a dump of its flash memory.

For Linux users, the Windows application appears to work OK using Wine. The USB interface on the device is supported by the pl2303 driver and appears as a serial port, e.g., /dev/ttyUSB0) providing raw NMEA data for gpsd or gpsdrive. Some further Linux information is at NaviLink for Linux. This page includes a link to a page describing a Perl script that can be used in place of the Windows program provided with the device.

Recent versions of gpsbabel can read the GT-11 memory directly. It may be necessary to use superuser privileges (su, sudo), but a console command of the form: gpsbabel -t -w -i navilink -f /dev/ttyUSB0 -o gpx -F <pathname/filename> works, including waypoints within the gpx file.

It can record 8,192 track points in the built-in flash memory at "compact", 1, 5, 10, 30 and 60 second intervals.

Track logs

It has a slot for an SD memory card which records tracks in NMEA format. A new log file is started as soon as the device is turned on and records continuously. We assume a:

The SD card track log data cannot be read via the USB cable. You need to remove the card and use an external card reader.

Initially the device failed to write any data to my SD card, but it worked fine after selecting the "format card" option. The same card had been working fine in a digital camera, so perhaps the NaviGPS is a little fussy about the formatting of the card (that's probably because the NaviGPS expects the card to be formatted without a partition table and will not use the card if it contains one).

To convert the track logs from NMEA to a format usable by OpenStreetMap, see the NMEA page.

Good Things

Bad Things

Summary

Seems to be ideal for the cyclist capturing tracklogs for OSM. Excellent price.

Manual

The PDF manual for the GT-11/BGT-11 is available from the Locosys Technology Web site.

Getting Routes from Google Maps

I have written a simple Perl script for grabbing routes from Google Maps in KML, and converting/saving them to .wtp/.rte format. The usage is: 

> gmap2ozi.pl [routename] [postcode 1] [postcode 2]

This could be made more generic quite easily — it is just a first stab! I wrote it out of frustration at my inability in getting useful information onto the device.

It is available at http://ave.wrigley.name/gmap2ozi.pl.

Retrieved from "http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/NaviGPS"
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