USB - Justin Foell

As you already know, I’m a fan of Topeak’s rack systems. They work great for carrying kids, groceries, panniers, etc. I’ve gone through a couple iterations of tail lights from Ax-Man Surplus that I usually just stick to the back of the rack with 3M Very High Bond (VHB) double-sided foam tape and some 3M adhesion promoter.

The foam tape, when used with adhesion promoter, works great for all bumps, jumps and falls. The cheap Ax-Man lights however, left something to be desired. One quit after some moisture got into the housing, the other quit because it was just plain cheap – I’d never paid more than $5 for any of them at Ax-Man.

Since I’d already invested over $100 in my front light, I figured it was time to give the back light some love. Continue reading →

My son Jules loves trains. I like trains too and my enthusiasm was probably the seed that grew into his obsession. My good friend Joe bought Jules a copy of “Trainz Railroad Simulator” for Christmas a year ago. It was in the bargain bin at Mills Fleet Farm:

Continue reading →

But rather than using the keyboard to play the game, I thought it would be easier to use some sort of joystick. A quick internet search yielded this:

It looks huge and intimidating, but based on some of the flight simulator setups I’ve seen, the train cab controller is positively tame:

Still at $180, I wasn’t about to buy the Train Cab Controller, which would certainly make the game infinitely more complex for a 5 year old. Trainz has a “DCC mode” which allows you to control the trains very simply like they are model trains: with a dial.

I always wanted a Griffin Powermate – a superfluous USB volume knob you can add to any computer. But now I had an actual use. I got a USB Powermate for $30 shipped from Amazon.

Powermate Setup for Trainz

When it arrived, I downloaded and installed their driver software. It renders terribly in Windows 7 (it was probably last updated for Windows XP):

The “click” and “long click” actions are hidden in the interface (you can only see 4 at a time). But they’re there, you just need to highlight an action, and arrow down until you get to others.

For the Trainz Simulator setup, I added the following settings:

Rotate Right: Send Key – W (forward)
Rotate Left: Send Key – X (reverse)

These keys control the forward/reverse dial in the game. I set the sensitivity fairly high (see screenshot) so a turn of the Powermate would closely match what you saw onscreen.

Click: Send Key – S (stop)
Long Click: Send Key – A (apply brake)

“S” stops the train by putting the dial immediately back to zero, so a quick click is an easy way to stop. Trains are heavy though and the “A” key normally applies the brake, so I added a long click action to apply the brake – I like to think of the long click like pressing the brake pedal in a car.

Enjoy

It works exactly as I imagined: simple! You can see the “dial” on the screen and the Powermate glowing under Jules’ hand that now controls it. Easy peasy.

Both the Griffin Powermate and Trainz Simulator (newer versions) are available for Mac OSX so Apple loving trainiacs won’t be left out.

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Garmin is the Apple iPod of GPS products. So when it came time to purchase a new GPS, I grabbed a Garmin eTrex Vista HCx. It had a great feature set for a handheld unit: SD card expansion, turn-by-turn directions, etc. And because it’s a Garmin, it had the best “hacker” support, namely: free maps from Open Street Maps.

The one thing that I was dissatisfied with was the software support under Linux. Sure you could plug it in, and retrieve data, but simple editing of tracks (splitting, joining) was tedious. Garmin’s free MapSource software worked well, but I wanted to avoid booting into Windows just to use it. Luckily I found this thread on ubuntuforums.org. I rehash here much of the info provided there, and include some updates.
Continue reading →

An Aside about Strava

I use my GPS mostly while cycling. A while back a friend tipped me off to a site called Strava where you can track your rides and compete virtually with others.

I’m not a competitive cyclist. I ride more to shuttle kids to the library, or for picking up groceries. But I do like to use my GPS while riding and upload the data to Strava to track my miles, calories burned, etc. It’s also fun to see what sort of excruciating rides competitive cyclists are doing.

My beef with Strava is that they just recently shut down the version 1 & 2 API access to their site. They are launching a new V3 API, but your application must be approved to use the service. Unless a new version to any API is fully available, it’s customary to leave the old version(s) of the API accessible for a period of time so developers can update their software. Unless the old API is causing undue stress on server hardware and equipment, there should be no reason that an old API is turned off before the new one is available.

My guess is that they (like Twitter) want to control who can/can’t use their API. It could also be a stupid knee-jerk reaction, like I’ve seen many governments and businesses make. Recently there was a lawsuit brought against Strava. They may now want to control the exact wording of the competitive elements of the apps so Strava users aren’t feeling coerced into regaining their top time by riding dangerously. It all feels like a digital nanny-state to me. My guess is that no open-source projects will be able to use the V3 API because there’s probably some DRM key (or equivalent) required to connect.

Nevermind that I’m a contributor to the Strava plugin for WordPress (which no longer works thanks to Strava). WordPress only powers a billion websites and has the largest market share of any web publishing platform. Isn’t the point of having an API to promote the widest adoption possible?!? If Strava doesn’t change, maybe I can convince tons of WordPress cyclists to switch to Garmin Connect – they don’t seem to be ostracizing developers.

/end soapbox

Back to installing MapSource…

Installing Wine

The first order of business is installing Wine:

sudo apt-get install wine

Then run winecfg (as your normal user). This will create a ~/.wine directory:

winecfg

Just click OK when the dialog appears.

Installing MapSource

In order to install the latest MapSource, you actually have to install an older version of the software first because MapSource checks for the presence of an earlier version during installation. Fooling the earlier versions to the presence of MapSource is actually quite easy:

cd ~/.wine/drive_c
mkdir Garmin
touch Garmin/MapSource.exe

Get an older version, like MapSource_6153.exe from http://gawisp.com/perry/mapsource/

Then run the installer:

wine ~/Downloads/MapSource_6153.exe

Follow the on screen instructions. Accept the license and it will install. At the end of the install you can launch MapSource – don’t do this! Uncheck the check mark and just exit the installation.

Once you’ve installed MapSource the simple way, you can then update to a newer version of MapSource which looks for a “proper” MapSource installation. There may be some sort of secret sauce to having your upgraded MapSource fully functional. I initially had problems with the newest version crashing when saving a GPX file. But then it went away when I did a couple of incremental upgrades. If you have this problem, maybe try removing the latest version through the Wine uninstaller and installing a slightly earlier version. Please comment if you have any insight as to what works and what doesn’t.

Add Maps

Adding a drive

My maps exist on a Windows partition on my computer. Rather than reinstalling the (huge) files in Wine, I added a Wine system drive that linked to my Windows partition.

After mounting the Windows partition (simply by selecting it under devices in the nautilus file manager), I then made a symlink to my ~/.wine/dosdevices/ folder:

cd ~/.wine/dosdevices
ln -s /media/justin/OS "o:"

Replace /media/justin/OS with the correct path to your Windows partition, once it’s mounted in Linux. I chose “O” as my drive letter since I normally mount the disk as “OS” – you can choose whatever drive letter you’d like.

Add registry keys

This is most easily done by exporting registry keys from Windows and importing them into Wine’s registry. Here is a screenshot from my registry from Windows:

In the UbuntuForums post, the author notes that MapSource looks for maps under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Garmin\MapSource\Families, where as my installation (Windows 7) had the maps installed under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Garmin\MapSource\Families. So I exported the keys from Families in my Windows installation and then installed them in the same place in the Wine registry.

wine ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/regedit.exe

After installing the key(s) into the Wine registry, I updated the values and changed any references to C:\ to O:\ – my custom Wine device that links to my Windows partition.

Once this is done you can test that your maps are being read correctly.

cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Garmin/
wine ./MapSource.exe

If your maps are installed correctly, they’ll show up under View > Switch to Product. Even if you have no maps installed, MapSource may still be useful to you for downloading tracks from your Garmin and exporting to other formats such as GPX.

Set up a COM device

In order for MapSource to be able to upload/download anything from your GPS, we need to set up a COM device so they can communicate. First load the garmin_gps kernel module (which strangely didn’t autoload in Ubuntu):

sudo modprobe garmin_gps
lsmod | grep garmin

And you should see something like:

garmin_gps 18212 0
usbserial 36911 1 garmin_gps

Turn on the GPS and connect it to the USB port. Then do:

ls /dev/ttyUSB*

You should see a device called ttyUSB0

Now we have to make this device visible as com1 port under Wine:

cd ~/.wine/dosdevices
ln -s /dev/ttyUSB0 com1

When you want to transfer data from your GPS, plug in your Garmin, then run:

sudo modprobe garmin_gps
cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Garmin
wine ./MapSource.exe

In the Transfer menu, select Receive From Device. You should now see your device and can transfer tracks, waypoints from your GPS into MapSource.

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Justin Foell

Technology, Bicycling, Hobbies, Kids, Life.

Tag Archives: USB

Specialized Stix Comp Tail Light

Trainz Simulator + Griffin Powermate