I am looking for direction on how to setup my USB GPS device, which is the USGlobalsat BU-353-S4 . The device uses the Prolific USB to Serial connection, and I have used the serial port mapping assistant to assign the port.

I cannot seem to get the GPSD to recognize the device and connect - do I need to install the Linux driver from Globalsat? I am setting this up on my Stellar Mate.

Thanks!

Let's bring the conversation out here in the case we can help somebody else with it as well.

I determined that the udev rules created by the gpsd maintainers were too broad. They created my mount USB interface as a gps device which gpsd was more than happy to then try to talk to so that my mount couldn't. I fixed my issue by removing the udev gpsd rule that matched my mount USB id. The flip-flat would have had the same problem. I mention this because @CosmicRuin has the same GPS hardware device.

To answer your question, all the drivers that you need should already be in the system. Nothing needs to be downloaded, or at least not in my case.

The first thing to try would probably be to plug only the GPS into USB, and reboot. Assuming that you have everything configured for gpsd and indi_gpsd is added to the driver list, it should then show up. If it does that means you likely have a port conflict with one of the other devices. If it does not show up, then something else is going on and you can try the below steps.

The next steps to debug this require shell access to the Stellar Mate (or any machine running gpsd for that matter).

1. With all your equipment plugged into the Stellar Mate and turned on, log in to the device, either ssh or console
2. issue the command 'lsusb" at a shell prompt. This will list all of the USB devices plugged into your Stellar Mate along with their identifies (xxxx:yyyy type number)
3. look at 'ls -l /dev/ttyUSB*' there should be one entry for each device. Also look at 'ls -l /dev/gps*' which should be a link to a ttyUSB from the previous command. If this link does not exist, then the gps device was not found by the system.
4. If the link does exist in 3 above, then you can try to run the command gpsman or gpscat to see if the device is returning any data. There should be a pretty constant stream

<to be continued>

Thanks for your reply @xsnrg, very helpful!

So far, the mount has been working fine (using INDI_EQMOD, with the EQDirect-USB cable to my Orion Atlas Pro). But I will try just booting on with only the GPS device, and see what I can find out.

Sorry I didn't include _any_ GPS stuff with StellarMate since it doesn't ship with one. At any rate, here is what I did now, and in the next StellarMate release, they should all be available as part of the OS:

Then reboot the unit. I found my GPS Unit (Got it with ODroid before) was mapped to /dev/ttyAMC0. I simply ran the INDI GPSD driver and all was OK except for the UTC Offset! It was set to -7 and I'm +3 so something is very wrong here, but all other data are fine.

And that's got it working perfectly Thanks Jasem!! Even my offset (-4) was correct!

and there is the proof that sometimes you just need to make sure it is plugged in.

With the right code installed! Haha