We have tested i-Boating Mac ENC plotter against several external GPS receivers - bluetooth, USB etc. i-Boating Mac ENC Chart Plotter Installer.
Once downloaded click on it and follow the instructions to install it.
Most external GPS receivers (Bluetooth, USB, Serial etC) are supported as long as they support a serial port profile for Mac OS.Ĭlick on the link below to download the i-Boating application installer for macbook.
dev/tty.I-Boating is available for Mac OS 10.12.0 or higher. Last login: Sat Apr 7 15:35:30 on console
How to proceed? can i create a serial port manually? You might be on the right path, since "bluetooth" and the "floiphone" are the EAXT and ONLY options which the gps-included utility app as well as open cpn do actually offer me in their drop-down menues for chosing a serial port for the incoming signal. See below the output in terminal for "ls /dev/tty*" Thanks for coming back on this, well appreciated! | "IOGeneralInterest" = "IOCommand is not serializable" | "USB Vendor Name" = "Prolific Technology Inc." | "USB Product Name" = "USB-Serial Controller" Hersteller-ID:Đx067b (Prolific Technology, Inc.) would be stoked if someone could give me a hint. maybe you guys can help me? see below the contents of my "ioreg" results and and the device listing in my system profiler, sorry it`s in german. BUT i cannot identify any name here that i could then look for when listing files in terminal. So, following your advice in this blog and not being a computer expert i got as far as checking my "ioreg". It is a different device than yours (globalsat bu-353 gps receiver prodice by "prolific") but i have the same problem as you (-: I am sitting on my sailing catamaran in trinidad with my family an cannot find the correct name of my gps dongle to put it into the data port field of my open cpn, thus not getting coordinates.
Since the dongle seems just to be spitting plain-text down the USB cable, I don't soon expect incompatibilities with future versions of OS X.
I'm using Mac OS X "El Capitan" (10.11), which is the latest version of OS X at the time of writing. I'm sorry I'm so wordy, but I hope these comments may be helpful to others in the future. On Mac I cannot do this, for some reason. On Linux I can `sudo cat /dev/ttyACM0` and get a bunch of text scrolling up the screen, the serial data that the GPS dongle is sending to the computer (NMEA sentences?). You could easily write a script (in Bash or Applescript) to search and replace the correct device node name in ~/Library/Preferences/opencpn/opencpn.ini before launching OpenCPN. Presumably I could just add both dev nodes in OpenCPN and then it would always work, irrespective of which port the dongle is plugged into but presumably the device node would then change again to something else if it was connected via a USB hub (perhaps this explains why Miquel Garcia's one has a 5-digit number at the end). On my Macbook right now it seems to show as /dev/tty.usbmodem621 on one USB port, and /dev/tty.usbmodem421 on the other. I'm not sure how prone the name of the device node is to change. I think the syntax to query the baud rate of the serial port on Mac is `stty -f /dev/tty*usbmodem*`, but my path to getting this working was a little convoluted, and I actually established this under Linux, where the command is `sudo stty -F /dev/ttyACM0` (the device node is named differently on Linux, ttyACM-whatever, instead of tty.usbmodem-whatever on Mac). Then OpenCPN's map immediately jumped to my location. The other part of the secret sauce is that the baud rate is 9600 - the dongle didn't work until I changed that. The following is to save anyone else the same difficulties. I was right about that, but I was naive in assuming that it would plug and play or that getting it to work would be obvious to a man of my abilities. I don't know if it was that quick to find my position the first time it started up - the seller did not advertise that this dongle works with Mac, but I figured that it likely would. It seems to be several meters more accurate than Google Maps on my phone, even inside my flat. Within 5 or 6 seconds the green light starts to flash, and it's already got a fix. It is advertised as "Vk-172 GPS/GLONASS Ublox7", and there seem to be many similar ones on eBay and .uk I bought the cheapest one I could find on eBay, which was £8 including postage from the seller "jk_parts store":
Cheap USB dongles were mentioned on another thread here 2 or 3 weeks ago, so I thought I'd buy one and try it on my Mac.