FSUIPC Support on PDAs

[westes]

Is there any chance we could convince you to support GPSOut and WideFS and MixW on PDAs running Windows Mobile 5.0? Because GPSOut can now provide NMEA standard GPS on the local serial port of the PDA, supporting these interraces would now allow all of the commercial PDA software that exists for general aviation to be used for FS2004! Doing this over a wireless TCP network without any clumsy serial cabling would greatly improve the utility and ease of setup of such devices.

[Pete Dowson]

Is there any chance we could convince you to support GPSOut and WideFS and MixW on PDAs running Windows Mobile 5.0?

No way, sorry.

Surely the application running on the PDA is the one with the COM input and you connect that to the COM output on the PC?

Doing this over a wireless TCP network without any clumsy serial cabling would greatly improve the utility and ease of setup of such devices.

Someone who knows how to program Windows CE should be able to to this in any case. It doesn't need GSPout, just an FSUIPC client program in the PC and a receiver program in the PDA, talking over TCP/IP or whatever.

How you deal with the virtual serial ports that MixW provides I've no idea. That's not my program in any case and I've no idea how it's done -- it may not even be possible on Windows CE.

Pete

[westes]

I want to feed a single NMEA stream from the computer running FS2004 to multiple devices that provide moving maps. Doing this with hardwired serial cables doesn't scale well. I thought that your GPSOut working together with the WideFS / MixW programs allowed remote devices to use virtual serial ports to acquire the NMEA signal.

You have 90% of the solution done, and someone just needs to adapt the code you already have to the Mobile 5.0 environment. I don't understand why anyone should need to write clients and servers that are proprietary between Mobile 5.0 and the FSUIPC computer. Obviously the PDA application guys are never going to do that because their target has always been general aviation and not flight simulation.

[Pete Dowson]

I thought that your GPSOut working together with the WideFS / MixW programs allowed remote devices to use virtual serial ports to acquire the NMEA signal.

Yes, but WideClient and MixW only run on PCs, so your need a PC for each such 'remote device'.

I don't understand why anyone should need to write clients and servers that are proprietary between Mobile 5.0 and the FSUIPC computer.

Well, I'm not sure about "proprietary", but I think such a solution might be a lot easier than trying to port complex applications which are very PC dependent and far more complex than needed just for this, onto a PDA.

Don't forget, for WideClient this is simply a trivial receive-data-and-pass-it-on exercise -- its main functions, in its purpose as support for FSUIPC applications, are far greater. If you throw all that away what's left would be easier to write from scratch for a PDA.

Additionally, as I said, I have no idea how MixW does what it does in the first place.

Obviously the PDA application guys are never going to do that because their target has always been general aviation and not flight simulation.

I'm not sure where the "PDA application guys" come into it, unless you mean someone who knows how to program PDAs. You'd need someone like that in any case.

I'm very sorry, but I am simply not interested in doing any development in this line whatsoever. The tools and information are available in the FSUIPC SDK to anyone who wants to take this on, but it won't be me. I have enough on my plate to last years as it is -- and, if fact, in future the GPSout function is likely to get absorbed into the FSUIPC user utility package in any case.

Regards,

Pete

[Wildfire563]

Part of your solution for running multiple GPS reading devices from a single device is Franson GPSGate - http://www.franson.com

They also supply libraries for virtual serial port and bluetooth driver creation.