Introducing the Freerunner Navigation Board

[Christoph Mair]

Am Mittwoch 21 Juli 2010, 11:22:20 schrieb Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller:
> Am 21.07.2010 um 10:55 schrieb Helge Hafting:
> > On 03. mai 2010 11:10, Jeffrey Ratcliffe wrote:
> >> On 3 May 2010 11:04, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller<hns at goldelico.com>  wrote:
> >>>> Having navigation work inside tunnels
> >>>> would allow mapping them accurately for openstreetmap. And also have
> >>>> underground navigation - some tunnels have got
> >>>> intersections/roundabouts inside, with several possible exits.
> >> 
> >> Would navit, tangogps, etc. need a new interface to access the
> >> sensors, or could the existing libraries be adapted to "correct" the
> >> GPS data with additional information from the extra sensors before
> >> handing it on to the GUI?
> > 
> > The natural place for such software seems to be in gpsd itself - it
> > already supports having several gps (position) devices. (Or possibly in
> > a front-end to gpsd - depends on what the gpsd developer wants.) But too
> > many processes / software layers is not good - it causes delays.
> 
> Well, for 1 position per second delays it may be neglectable, but you are
> right - having everything in one "middle-man" daemon (gpsd) appears to be
> the best architecture for me. So it hides the complexity from the
> user-applications, and should be easily expandable.
> 
> As far as I know, the kernel driver for the BMP085 barometric altimeter is
> already in some upstream kernel release candidate. So altitude information
> can be mixed between GPS and altimeter as well.
Well, not in a release candidate. The patch waits in Andrew Morton's MM tree 
to be sent upstream. This will probably happen after 2.6.35 has been released.
In the meantime I will send patches against the SHR kernel to the shr-devel 
mailing list. Hopefully they will be included by default when the navigation 
board v2 becomes available.

I started to document the features of the new board: 
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Freerunner_Navigation_Board_v2

This might be the right place to collect ideas or suggestions on how to use 
the new possibilities.

Christoph