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Getting GPSd to work with Python and Threading

This article is now available at: https://tinkerprojects.xyz/nerd-stuff/getting-gpsd-to-work-with-python/

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52 Comments

  1. Get the hardware then make the plan. Learn a language for a project. I love everything about this!

  2. Thanks for this!

  3. Excellent! Thanks!!

  4. I have the exact same environment as you , but I get this error:

    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File “gps.py”, line 29, in
    gpsp = GpsPoller() # create the thread
    File “gps.py”, line 19, in __init__
    gpsd = gps(mode=WATCH_ENABLE) #starting the stream of info
    NameError: global name ‘gps’ is not defined

    • Dan Mandle

      February 27, 2013 — 8:27 am

      Is it possible that you don’t have the python GPS libraries installed?

      • Hi Dan!
        I just discovered this helpful blog and I’d like to ask you something. I have been trying to run your code to pull data from the GPS module but I always get “0.0” and “nan”. I am using Python 2.7.9, the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, OS Raspbian “Jessie” and the Adafruit GPS module. I don’t know what’s going on, maybe you can give me more details about the hardware/software that you used to run your code. I would try to reproduce the same scenario here in order to get the code up and running. I am doing a project and getting data from the GPS is my start point. I look forward to hearing from you soon. Hugs. Jose Vilela.

    • Make sure you haven’t named your file “gps.py” otherwise python can’t import the gps.py library,

      You can also copy the gps.py library to the directory where you have your script to make sure it can be imported.

  5. Thank’s a lot for your snippet, realy usefull & interesting 🙂

  6. Thanks for your post – it helped me get a gpsd output in python. It made me realise that gps.fix doesn’t hold any useful data until you have called gps.next() enough times to read in some helpful status lines from gpsd.

    Also, I managed to get it working with a QStarz bluetooth gps. I used “sudo apt-get install bluetooth bluez-utils –no-install-recommends” to install a minimal set of bluetooth drivers (no GUI support), then used the instructions at http://www.catb.org/gpsd/bt.html to set up the RFCOMM port and configure gpsd to use it from startup.

    The only catch I had was getting my bluetooth dongle working. To start with I could detect the USB dongle, but not bring up the interface with hcitool. I had to add “dwc_otg.speed=1” to my /boot/cmdline.txt file. That downgrades the speed of the USB bus from USB 2.0 to USB 1.1 – it seems there is a kernel bug with USB support. While changing the bus speed fixed the problem for me, other people report it causes problems with ethernet and other USB devices.

  7. Nice code Dan!! Worked first time. I’d like to add to your code some things I wanted gpxlogger to do. See the whole project thread here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=49852&p=389004#p389004 (raspberry forum, “GPS not working well” thread). As always, will be leaving your authorship on the attribution line at the top.

  8. Thanks Great Code!
    The Adafruit example didn’t work for me

  9. Thanks a lot for your post!!! 🙂 It helped me a lot, I finally get the longitude and latitude data from the GPS in python. At first I also got the same error message (“global name ‘gps’ is not defined”). It turned out I had another program in the same folder called gps.py, after I renamed it, the code worked perfectly.
    I am using a Garmin GPS18xUSB, no other code addressing the GPS device directly worked for me.

  10. Thanks a lot for this, I used your code as the basis for creating my own GPSController class.

    http://www.stuffaboutcode.com/2013/09/raspberry-pi-gps-setup-and-python.html

    • Dan Mandle

      September 20, 2013 — 8:53 am

      Thanks! I’m glad we can share! I’m ‘borrowing’ your code from your OBD-II reader for the Pi to create a car logger! Been busy, so I haven’t been able to work on it, but I’ll let you know when it’s ready! Also let me know if you’d be interested in collaborating!

  11. Why is there self.current_value = None still in this snippet?
    Leftover from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6146131/python-gps-module-reading-latest-gps-data ?

  12. Thanks alot, i’m going to use your code for a High altitude balloon project.

  13. I have a question, i want to use python for my project, and i already install the gpsd and already copy your coding. However, when i try to run it on idle3, it say there are no module name gps. (error at line 5). What should i do?

    • Dan Mandle

      March 3, 2014 — 11:46 am

      Unfortunately this is the only project I’ve done with Python, so I can’t help you. Hopefully someone who sees this and can help!

      • Owh i see. In this project, you are using idle or idle3?

      • Ok, i get the problem. I am using the python 3 (idle3= python 3) and in python 3 there are no modules name GPS.
        now i am using idle (python) , but i encountered a different problem… it related to something with ” non-ASCII character ‘\xc2’ ”
        do you know anything about it?

        • Hello, there is no gps module for python3. But i solved the problem using memory mapped files (shared memory) between a gps requester working with python2 and the gps module and a thread which reads the current coordinates from the shared memory with python3. Both have a class design for reuse.

  14. Works like a charm! Thanks!

  15. Dude, you are my hero ! 🙂
    Since the info on Python and gpsd from PerryGeo (just google it) is so outdated, it did not work at all.
    Thanks to your little code example, now finally everything works exactly as expected. Fantastic !

  16. hello
    your script is working good for me
    how can i simply log this data on a CSV file

    i have tried different thing but i am not good in programing
    must be simple , but didn t sucess

    thank you , for all your answer

    • before time.sleep(5)
      you have to put this;
      with open(‘gpsdData.csv’, ‘a+’) as csvfile:
      writer = csv.writer(csvfile)
      writer.writerow([gpsd.utc, gpsd.fix.latitude, gpsd.fix.longitude])

      and all data will be saved in a csv file.

  17. Hi, is there a simple way to tanslate results from gpsdData.py to kml (for Google earth use) ?

  18. Hi , this post has been really helpfull…
    I´m really interesting in send the datas to google map in a client pc…
    Thanks

  19. Thank you! This post is awesome. The code actually works for me without any modification. I now need to have this data streamed on an actual web page…

  20. Bloody useful, Thanks

  21. Thanks a lot for the code! It’s a great piece of code for figuring out threading in python as well as how to interface with gpsd. It worked pretty much right out of the box with a USB puck on my raspberry B+. One thing, i also ran into the “global name ‘gps’ is not defined” at first. Turns out you cannot call the code gps-py, rather name it gpsmon.py or something.

  22. hi all

    i am having a problem with latitude and longitude readings.
    It seems to only appear 0.0 for both readings.
    any help?

  23. Dan,
    Thank you for this. I found you from a link on the Adafruit website. I am completely new to linux, Raspberry Pi and Python (a triple threat). But this just worked. Better than that, I think I know how to get the information I want from the daemon.

    My backup plan was to use Pyserial to read the UART directly and just parse out what I wanted from the NMEA sentences. Not pretty. But I think I have some code already for that. I thin this will be way more elegant.

    Now all I have to do is learn enough Python to write my application. 🙂

    Thanks again,
    Joe

    • Dan Mandle

      January 4, 2016 — 8:31 am

      If Python isn’t your thing, there are also libraries for at least PHP and Node.JS. Note: Node is pretty slow on the RPi.

  24. Anyone else have trouble with this code at the .join() line? it hangs the whole thing and I have to use a fairly serious kill -9 to get rid of it all. Any help or ideas are appreciated, I have used this code verbatim as well as with debugging code, it must be beyond my skills. The non-thread equivalent seems to work fine(just took the same steps in a simple loop to prove that the process works), but I need to always grab the newest values.

    Thank you,

  25. Tanks! Great Code! This helped me a lot!

  26. Worked Great! Just don’t save it as gps.py – that creates big problems…

  27. Mr.Mandle,
    Thank you. Your gpsd thread works fine.
    I volunteer at a small tourist railway. I built a gps activated system to play sound effect when we run Halloween trains. It was built around a Parallax chip. I chose this because I am fluent in programming in basic.
    The system work well but there were two problems. 1- I was out of memory in the parallax chip. And 2- The GPS receiver was not weather proof.I found the BU353 and decided to learn Python. I am using your program and learning Python on a Raspberry Pi at the same time. When using the Parallax chip, the receiver sent the following data via the RS232 port: $GPRMC,195928.177,A,3547.7690,N,07904.4575,W,0.17,150.49,040814,,,A*71
    I expected the same data from the BU353. Do you where I can find information on the GPS formats for data?
    I did have a problem when the data format on the BU353 suddenly changed for some unknown reason.
    I am using pygame to play the audio tracks and it sometimes stops working and I have to reboot the Raspberry Pi.

  28. Awesome work and works well!!!
    Thank you for putting this up – I just have a couple of questions though..

    Do you know if there is a way to get a ‘Lock’ and a ‘Valid Data’ status out of either GPSD or the data coming into Python?

    I would like to make a little breakout box that connects to a RaspberryPi’s GPI/O header that when GPSD has a lock it brings on an LED (and turns off when it looses a fix) and when there is data received it will flash another LED.

    I am not too fussed on accuracy of the LED’s PPS – its more of an indication that the unit has powered up correctly, locked on to satellites and is getting valid data.

    I just cant seem to find anything on line for this, and would be really appreciative of any assistance you can render.

    • Dan Mandle

      August 8, 2016 — 2:27 am

      Glad it’s working well for you. I assume you mean a satellite lock? If you look at the print statements in the Python code, there are a few ways to determine that. If you have lat/lon data that’s >0, you have a fix, for instance. You can also see the number of satellites you’re using through gpsd.satellites. As for “data received”, it’s actually going to be coming in faster than you’re going to be able to handle it, which is why we’re using threading. If you really what it to flash for each read, you can add that function near gpsd.next(), but I suggest you have it flash as you process the data instead (inside the main loop).

  29. Hello again Mr. Mandle,

    As I said back in July I am using your GPS code to play Halloween sound effects. It works fine. I have it installed and running on 2 systems. I just tried to install the gps software on another Raspberry Pi, but the: sudo apt-get install python gpsd gpsd-clients procedure does not work. When I launch cgps -s, it times out. I found that the /lib/udev/gpsd.hotplug file does not exist and copying it from another source doesn’t thelp.

    Any suggestions??

    Regards, Ted Dunn

  30. Hi Dan,

    Thanks for posting this, but I just wanted to point out one thing — this code’s not thread-safe.

    You’re accessing the “gpsd” variable from multiple threads without any synchronization, so technically, every once in a great while, you’ll get a mish-mash of two subsequent GPS readings (e.g. latitude from time A with longitude from time B).

  31. Awesome – worked out of the box! Make sure to have the ublox gpsd enabled like here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=53644

  32. GREAT, worked a treat on OrangePi, after having prob with cat reading UART but not GPSD found solution
    here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=63799
    and using answer by Screspo altered default/gpsd to point to serial input

  33. Hi Dan,

    Thanks for your code, it is a great base to do everything with python and gpsd.

    I put it to work in a Rpi Zero W, last version of Raspian (Stretch) without touching anything of your code.

    Cheers!

  34. Hi Dan, thanks a ton for this code. If I wanted to see the data at 10hz rate, what would I need to modify? I assume the time.sleep (5) line would modify this. It seems like after running your program the GPS is updating very very slowly.

    • Dan Mandle

      July 18, 2018 — 5:42 am

      Your GPS receiver would need to support 10hz. Read the rest of the post to see how the code works. If there’s data available, it’ll populate.

  35. This is incredible to find a solution that only needed to be migrated to Python3 by updating the print statements. It is perfect for helping log values from gpsd. Thank you.

  36. Dear Dan, only one word: Amazing post! Amazing job! after 7 days surfing everywhere, I found here all I need to run my Raspi+U-blox 8 USB GPS dongle. Thank You very much! 🙂

  37. Truly excellent. I’m doing an Adafruit little 4 line display and they anly seem to support python3. Took me a few minutes to update your code from “print ‘data'” to “print(‘data’) and have it do everything I needed it to do. Using a PiZero, generic USB GPS, (shows as ttyACM0), the Adafruit display, and a nice little power pack. I appreciate the effort you took to get this out there.

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