Author: Eric Raymond
Description: The GPSD project wishlist, how to help us help you. Hardware we would love to have.
Keywords: GPS, gpsd, hardware, wishlist

GPSD Wish List

The `gpsd` project has neither corporate sponsorship nor a budget; it relies on donations of development time and hardware. If we're very lucky, we may someday get some help from our (so far, nonexistent) Google ad revenues.

Because actual hardware is involved, it's all too easy to spend a lot of money keeping up with new technologies. A single version of a technical standard might cost $100, an OEM board or consumer receiver might be another $100 and full evaluation kits can range between $500 and $5000.

You can help by donating money or hardware. The hardware table below lists the GPSes we'd like to be able to test with regularly. Where there are initials in the table, we have what we need in a developer's hands. The blank spaces need to be filled in.

An "Evaluation kit" is what GPS manufacturers sell people who are going to do serious development with their products. It includes access to their documentation, something they often make unreasonably difficult for anyone who doesn't buy the kit.

The entire kit we presently need would probably cost about $25K, with maybe $5000 per annum enough to cover the most important new evaluation kits that come out each year. But we could make excellent use of much smaller donations — in 2006, consumer-grade GPS mice tend to cost $60 to $80 each, and the more different varieties of those we can test early, the less likely users are to run into a problem later.

An effective way to contribute, if you are thinking of buying one of the GPSes we don't have, is to buy two of them and send us one. That way you can be effectively certain that `gpsd` will fully support it. If you're not sure about what's in a receiver, or want help picking one we don't yet support, just ask us.

Hardware
Receiver type | Evaluation kit | Retail or OEM product
Garmin | - | gem, jf
Hemisphere Crescent | - | OEM Module
Javad JNScore | JGG100 | JNS100
Javad Triumph | Triumph-1 | OEM
Novatel OEM7 | - | -
Septentrio AsteRx-i S | - | -
Trimble Mini-T | - | -
Trimble Resolution-T | - | -
Trimble Thunderbolt | - | csk
TrueNorth Revolution | - | -
u-blox Antaris4-T | csk | -

Unlike Internet standards, which are commonly available on-line and often freely redistributable, GPS standards tend to be expensive paper documents issued under restrictive terms. We link to the ones available on-line from on our References page; we don't have copies of most of the paper ones.

Where there are version numbers in the table below, at least one GPSD core developer has that version of the standard. The blank spaces need to be filled in. Links go to where that standard can be purchased.

Documentation
Document | Single Version | Update Subscription
NMEA 0183 | - | -
NMEA 2000 | - | -
NTRIP | 10410.1 | -
RTCM | 10402.3, 10403.3 | -
RINEX | 2.11, 3.04 | -

All our software is free and available to everyone. Please help us get the standards and test hardware we need so we can do a better job on behalf of everyone.