Overview
For this project, my goal was to get GPS data into my Mac for some visualization experiments with ActionScript. After some initial prototypes that worked well using an RS232-to-USB converter, I decided that wasn’t slick enough and had it too many wires. I like things nice and clean around my desk, so I opted for adding Bluetooth in place of a USB converter.

After experimenting with some different methods, some using microprocessors and some not, I opted for the simpler route, eliminating the microprocessor. A microprocessor doesn’t add anything other than cost for the basic purpose of this project. Although stay tuned for another posting about integrating a similar configuration with the Make Controller and Arduino microprocessors.


Continue Reading »

I’ve been attempting to hook up a serial GPS device to my Make Controller and read in data using OSC commands from mchelper prior to interfacing it with AS3 (as an aside, it’s really nice to be able to do this with the new version of mchelper). While I’ve been able to write to the serial port successfully using both /serial/char and /serial/block, reading from it always yields some sort of disaster.
Continue Reading »