Neatly packaged GPS parser for Go

Speed! Memory usage! Reasons!

The existing set up with GPSd, was a bit too hefty for our use case. GPSd would alone use around 5MB of our precious, but rather limited, 256MB Raspberry Pi + another 2MB for our go-gpsd client.

gps, on the other hand, is tuned for performance and minimal memory consumption. A simple application based on gps shouldn't use more than 2MB of RAM and no more than 1.3% of CPU* - since it doesn't have any of GPSd's fancy features like hot-plugging, JSON interface or support for various devices. gps simply listens for GPGGA and GPRMC sentences (and no other), parses them, combines into a single fix and hands them off to the user.

* Disclamer: all measurements were made on a first version, model B Raspberry Pi with 256 megs of RAM.

# go get github.com/stratoberry/gps

dev, err := gps.Open("/dev/ttyAMA0")
if err != nil {
    panic(err)
}
    
dev.Watch()
for fix := range dev.Fixes {
    fmt.Println(fix.Lat, fix.Lon, fix.Alt)
}

gps.Device has a Fixes channel (chan *gps.Fix) to which all GPS fixes will be sent.

Inspect the gps.go file in this repository or take a look at godocs.

To find out more about the Stratoberry Pi project, take a look at our web site: stratoberry.foi.hr

gps is available freely under the MIT license, for more details take a look at the LICENSE file within repository.