Arduino GPS tracking through xBee

I have been looking for programs to plot live GPS data onto Google Earth and am unable to find a suitable program to do so.

I have tried using Earth Bridge, but has a lot of problems, like a single missing character in the NMEA string causing the program to stop tracking. This is not a real problem when using GPS -> computer direct, but this happens often enough through xBee to make tracking useless. I have tried to contact the dev team, but the project seems to be discontinued. Earth bridge seems to be designed for an old google earth, and gives frequent errors. The missing characters are not the only thing that stops it, it seems that it will give up after about 20 points.

Other older programs give similar errors

If anyone even knows of a basic live (Serial) NMEA to KML converter. Google Earth could handle it from there, just do a network link updating every second.

I am for no reason however tied to google earth, im quite happy to use something else (as long as its free)

Hi Appros,

I am too looking for a way of achieving a similar thing using GE, using a GPS module transmitting it via an Xbee, however I am unsure how to get the receiving Arduino to update a CSV file on my computer, how did you achieve this?

Cheers,

Jake

/subscribing since I'm looking for something similar.

This is something I've been looking for as well... Obviously, the tricky part is the file conversion in real-time. One thing I found is not for Google Maps KML but rather for OpenStreetMap GPX- Converting/NMEA to GPX - OpenStreetMap Wiki
I haven't tried it yet, but once I do I'll be sure to report back.

1 Like