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README file for the MTKBabel program
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Copyright 2007 - 2011 Niccolo Rigacci <niccolo@rigacci.org>
Get latest version and other info at:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mtkbabel
http://www.rigacci.org/wiki/doku.php/doc/appunti/hardware/gps_logger_i_blue_747

MTKBabel is a Perl program to operate the i-Blue 747 GPS data logger.
It should work also with other GPS devices based on the MediaTek MTK
chipset. It is free software released under the GPL license.

The main capabilities are:

  * Command line interface
  * Save data log in GPX and raw binary format
  * If required retrieve all the data, also the old one being overlapped
  * Change logging criteria: time, distance, speed
  * Change log format
  * START/STOP logging
  * Set OVERLAP or STOP method on memory full
  * Erase the internal memory

The progam is written in Perl, and it was tested on Linux via USB
connection. One goal is easy portability to C and small RAM footprint.

Run mtkbabel -h for a brief help screen.

In order to run the mtkbabel program you should have installed a
standard Perl distribution, plus the following libraries:

  * Device::SerialPort
  * Date::Format

Check if your operating system provides a package for them, or refer
to the cpan(1) manual page.


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KNOWN BUGS
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* Floating point numbers and non-i386 architectures

Convesion of floating point numbers (64 bit doubles and 32 bit
floats) from MTK binary format to GPX text is done with the Perl
unpack() function.

This seems to work properly on the GNU/Linux i386 architecture,
(I think both uses IEEE 754 encoding). It fails - at least - on my
Arm box, with an XScale processor.

The function mtk2number() should be rewritten using some math
library or in pure Perl.