How to configure and use GPS over bluetooth

If you have bluetooth GPS dongle that you have laying around, or can borrow one from somebody, and like driving a bike or a car around then this is the guide for you.

You need to have bluetooth wireless chip already installed on your laptop. If you have a laptop or a desktop without bluetooth you can buy and use USB bluetooth dongle.

You can check if you have a bluetooth and that it is working correctly using this command:

hcitool dev

Then let’s make sure you have bluetooth service running:

service bluetooth status

if it is not running just start it with:

service bluetooth start


Turn on your bluetooth GPS dongle and find its bluetooth mac address with hcitool command:

hcitool scan
Scanning …
00:1E:EE:00:11:22 LG KU990
00:02:78:99:FF:00 SJ GPS
00:12:EE:55:00:FF Device01

If you find more than one bluetooth device you should know the name of your GPS dongle. My GPS dongle has a “GPS” in its name so it is easy to catch its mac address: 00:02:78:99:FF:00 (SJ GPS)

You need to install gpsd and setup bluetooth config files, so let’s first install gpsd:

su -
yum install gpsd gpsd-clients -y

Then you need to edit bluetooth config file so that gpsd connects automatically to GPS bluetooth dongle.

gedit -etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf

and add these lines:

rfcomm0 {
# Automatically bind the device at startup
bind yes;

# Bluetooth address of the device
device 00:12:EE:55:00:FF;

# RFCOMM channel for the connection
channel 1;

# Description of the connection
comment “GPS Bluetooth dongle”;
}

After reboot check if you have /dev/rfcomm0 device with:

ls -al /dev/rfcomm0

If after reboot (or you don’t wan’t to reboot) you still don’t have /dev/rfcomm0 then just issue this command:

rfcomm bind rfcomm0

Now start gpsd daemon:

gpsd /dev/rfcomm0

Now you can start having fun! :)

Install gps applications like tangogps, gpsdrive and gpsbabel:

yum install tangogps gpsdrive gpsbabel