Looking for some help for our upcoming Beacon Test in July.

G7ToWin http://www.gpsinformation.org/ronh/ is a program that will allow you to get a bitmap screenshot of a GPS display. One of our volunteers used this last year as an experiment and it worked very nice, compared to our use of photographs of the screen. We take photographs of the satellite screen to show how many satellites are in view, their signal strength and configuration, and the lat/lon location. See below for samples:

Screenshot Bitmap Image from G7toWin (converted to JPEG):



Photo image of GPS Screen (reduced down for display here, so actual image is better, but still no comparison to clarity of bitmap image above)



Right now it seems the only way to do this is to copy to the clipboard, then copy to a graphics program and then save with a descriptive file name. Way too slow and awkward to use in the field. What I'd like to be able to do is allow a volunteer to just press a button at the start of a particular test and it would automagically grab the bitmap image every 5 or 10 seconds from the Garmin GPS, it takes a few seconds just to write the bitmap via the serial port, and save it with a date and time stamp of some sort. Even better if we could note the particular test (Baseline, Marine or Inland and Alpha - Zulu) and beacon make and model (could also be a drop down selection, only testing four beacons types).

Would anyone here be interested in taking a stab at something like this? Must be done and fully tested and debugged, ready to go by end of June.

Thanks,

Have you talked to the program author yet? It should be relatively easy to add an option which grabs screenshots after a user specified delay. The site makes it look like freeware, which means the author is doing it for the best of all possible motives (it's useful to him, and useful to others), so there's a good chance he'll work with you on it.

Spoke to him last year and he indicated he is really too busy to customize it for our purposes on a quick turn around basis. I'm sure he'd be happy to help with information, but he isn't in a position to do it himself.

I'd like to help, but I'm not a windoze programmer. If no one else steps up, I'll see what I can do, but it may mean installing some additional stuff on your laptop. (I don't do Visual Basic. Maybe Java with serial port extensions or perl or...)

This would be easy to do under Linux, but I'm guessing there are all sorts of reasons you'd rather not go that way. <img src="/images/graemlins/frown.gif" alt="" />

VB or Perl would be fine. We're stuck in the Windwoes rut, I'm afraid. <img src="/images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" />

Thanks again for the offer I've got someone to do it., so you're off the hook. <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />