How to create a virtual serial port?

[JanC]

Stuart Davenport wrote:

> My point in all this is actually that I ordered a USB GPS Receiver and

I just bought one myself a couple of weeks ago.  They sell them at 10-13
euro on computer fairs these days, that's too cheap to not buy one... ;)

> it wont arrive for another two weeks, being my impatient self, I am
> writing an app for my iPhone to broadcast its GPS location over the
> network to my laptop. I then want to get this data into the NMEA
> format and push this data onto a PTY - this will in-effect replace the
> USB GPS Receiver and the GPS software can read it :)

Well, on normal linux/unix systems it would be easy, as in general
applications there use 'gpsd'[1] to access GPS data, which you can then
access from every application (instead of one application monopolizing the
serial port) and it even supports access over TCP/IP.

I don't know if gpsd works on Mac OS X[2] and the iPhone *and* with your
application though (it doesn't emulate a serial port, so I think not...).

Applications shouldn't monopolize a resource like a GPS without giving
access to the data for others (like gpsd does)...


[1] <http://gpsd.berlios.de/>
[2] well, [1] says that it does, but is not officially supported

-- 
JanC