Have an odd question. I’m looking at making a WiFi transmitter that will take a GPS NMEA string in and transmit it back out so that it can be picked up by an iPad or something.
Never done anything like this… anyone done anything like this or have guidance on how to start this?
for legal reasons one should take the single in from an FCC approved radio then submit it over s message broker like mqtt then have your app on the iPad/mobile/web subscribe to the message queue topic.
Does it have to be wi-fi? For less than $100 you can buy a GPS antenna with bluetooth-out. I used to use one with a Handspring Visor for geocaching back when I couldn’t afford a decent handheld GPS unit.
OK, lots of good questions, that I don’t have all the answers to.
Not battery powered would be hardwired to a PC. It could possibly be Bluetooth…
The GPS ‘signal’ would be from a computer running a simulator that can output a a data string likely through an old serial output or something. I’m honestly not sure what the data string format would be at the moment, still working that out - Possibly something like NMEA, maybe something as simple as a text string with the data I need, but in a different format.
Either way it would likely have to undergo some manipulation as it is likely not in the format recognized by the app. The app needs a 1Hz string with Lat / Long / Altitude / Track / Ground Speed and some other line identifiers.
The key here is making the hardware interface that can take the data string, do a manipulation to it, then send it off via wifi or bluetooth that can be picked up by an iPad thats a few feet away.
A lot of this functionality is off the shelf if you know what your looking for.
For example if your trying to fake out an iPad app using Bluetooth/WI-FI is not going to do it but google Pokémon Go hacks (the path here is not a good place with the fcc)
For example you just want gps on an app there are tons of apps that already do this that support external sources.
GPS Simulators have also gotten very good over the last 10 years thanks to the surge in SDR tech.
The goal is to be able to take a location string from a flight simulator and then transfer it to the data string that would be output by a device similar to what @DanielHooper listed above so that it could be read in an app like ForeFlight.
Unfortunately, the flight sim does not have the same functionality that’s already built into the things like MS Flight Sim X or X-Plane. It does however put out a location string in the form of Lat/Long/Alt and some other things (not sure what they are just yet but working on that).
So the 2 goals are: 1) decrypt the stream coming from the flight sim and manipulate it to the format Foreflight uses, and 2) Send this as a wifi stream similarly to how the Stratux box does.
If you are not aware, ForeFlight will not accept a datastream from just any device. I was told last year that Stratux is the only non-commercial (unlicensed) device that it will accept data from.
There may be a mechanism for giving spoofed location information to iOS, but I’m not sure about that one.