On 03/05/10 12:28, Alex (Maxious) Sadleir wrote: > On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 8:18 PM, Risto H. Kurppa<[email protected]> wrote: >> Hi there! >> >> does anyone know what's the current status of GSM base station -based >> positioning services.. >> How do the different databases compare to each other nowadays? >> >> Are there clients to position the user based on the GSM base stations, >> with on- or offline databases? >> It'd be great to be able to detect the approximate location from GSM >> signal and then hook up to GPS faster.. > > You can get the approximate locations of the celltowers detected > nearby with both the cellhunter and openbmap APIs (online). Averaging > these and scaling by signal strength gets an alright accuracy > (100-500m in some places). AFAIK there isn't an openmoko client for > doing that. > > This accuracy would be better with WLAN essid locations like > Google/Skyhook do... I notice openBmap now has "wifi data" being > uploaded on their website so you might be asking at just the right > time. There is a specification for wifi uploads ( > http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/myposition/index.php?title=Wifi_log_format > ) that is used on Windows Mobile but the openmoko client hasn't been > updated to publish this as far as I know. I would certainly be very > excited to collect more data if it was updated :) > > There is a project called openbmap-locator that uses an offline > version of the openbmap database to emulate a GPS interface via > fso-ogpsd ( http://github.com/baruch/openbmap-locator ). It has a few > compile time dependencies on SHR including vala which I had to > download a tarball for and compile instead of using opkg (i'm sure if > you have a desktop OE buildenv, it's much easier). The first time you > run it, it downloads a testing sqlite database to > ~/.openBmap/cellid.db > It is supposed to be possible to download an updated SQL database > using a URL like > http://openbmap.org/latest/cellular/244_sqlite_zones.zip where 244 is > the MCC for the country you want... but there isn't a file for finland > and the file for australia (505) seems corrupted. Germany (262) works > fine but that's not where I am and I don't know how to convert/import > it to sqlite. So all in all, needs some more help to get it ready for > normal users.
I have been uploading to openbmap for a while now. but not tried openbmap-locator. it would be great if someone could put up a package for openbmap-locator, and maybe have it in SHR. could it be set up so that you just drop the data files into the right place and it works. i am sure it would be especially useful for people in cities, where it can take quite a while to get a fix. Sam _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
