Is there a tutorial or guide of some type to help me setup my GlobalSat USB GPS receiver to set the time and location in EKOS/KSTARS? I've already made sure I have gpsd installed and can get LAT/LONG/TIME in Terminal using gpsmon, so I know the device works. In INDI I added GPSD under one of the AUX devices, but I can't seem to find where or how to grab the data coming off the receiver to make it useful upon connection. I have a portable setup and no internet so I am really trying to avoid having to manually set the time every time I go out to image.

Once the INDI GPS driver is active (and has data), it will relay this information to KStars and INDI.

To have KStars accept this data. Go to Settings --> INDI --> and change Device Updates to "Device"
For your mount, just go to Options and set GPS to GPSD and then click save configuration. Now if you go to GPSD and click "Update", both the mount and KStars will be updated. Next time you connect, all of this will happen automatically for you.

and actually, I just now made a change in KStars so that all the steps above are not required. Once GPS INDI driver is detected, it will perform all the above automatically. It should be available in the next KStars release shortly.

Ok. There is just one thing I am not sure about regarding GPSD. Is there UTC offset reported by GPSD accounts for day light saving time (DST) or not?

When time finally polled in gpsmon, the offset for my location was -5 UTC, which was correct. I'll have to try it out next time I set up. Thanks for your help.

knro wrote: There is just one thing I am not sure about regarding GPSD. Is there UTC offset reported by GPSD accounts for day light saving time (DST) or not?

Yes, it does. It's one of the recent fixes to the driver.

Alright, finally got my setup inside and all hooked up. According to gpsmon, I have LAT/LONG and time. When connecting to GPSD in INDI, it appears the data stream from the receiver is not making it into EKOS/KSTARS: The status down at the bottom just says "GPS fix is in progress..." The fields for TIME and UTC offset are only populated because I have the RPi3 on my home network.

OK so I apparently answered my own question. In order to get data to GPSD, I had to edit /etc/default/gpsd and set DEVICES="/dev/GPS" and reboot. After that, I got GPS and TIME data in the appropriate fields in EKOS. "GPS" is the name I gave my receiver in the serial port manager, its hardware address is ttyUSB2. The DEVICES field was originally blank, hence GPSD did not know where to look for a data stream.

Is there a way to automate this for future Stellarmate users, so they don't have to bang their heads on a keyboard for hours on end? I would imagine a lot of imagers who don't have an observatory to call home would like to use a GPS receiver to sync up to and have it be not so freakin' difficult. I had to leave this forum to find an answer that made it finally click for me, there is no guide on how to do this here. A novice wouldn't even realize they can't just go into the gpsd file outright and edit it. It ain't like Windows where any file can be edited anywhere. I had to gksudo Pluma to make the file writable. Luckily I know enough about Linux to get myself into trouble, which is both a good and bad thing

Good you're finding your way around in Linux!
I used U-Plux AG which I got from HardKernel and I never had to edit any files to get it working with StellarMate.

@Kaczorek, is there any editing necessary? or does it depends on the GPS device?

Editing is necessary. It does not depend on a gps device as far as it is serial USB device.

GPSD driver relies on gpsd service running in the operating system you connect your gps receiver to. It was designed this way to use standard interface existing in linux system which enables sharing gps signal among various applications (not locking serial gps device by just INDI driver). This means that before using GPSD driver you need to have gpsd device configured correctly. It does work out of box in many cases, but not always.

gpsd service needs to know what serial device to use as a source for gps signal. So you must configure it in /etc/default/gpsd file by setting DEVICES="/dev/YOUR_GPS_SERIAL_DEV". The problem is that in our setups we use many serial devices over USB (mount, focuser, gps, other...) and each of them is represented by a device node i.e. /dev/ttyUSBx. Connecting these devices in different order may result in gps device is assigned different device node. To fix this you can assign unique name to your device in serial port manager (GUI) or in udev rules (terminal).

Now, how can we improve user experience? By removing driver's dependence on gpsd service and rewriting the driver to read gps data stream directly from a device. We could use connections plugin framework instead to search for gps device. However this approach is not the best practice for accessing gps device in linux systems and locks gps device for any other application that needs to use it (e.g. ntp server for syncing operating system time based on gps NMEA and PPS). So I would recommend to leave it as it is.

Just remember to set DEVICES="/dev/YOUR_GPS_SERIAL_DEV" in /etc/default/gpsd file and restart gpsd service before using INDI GPSD device driver

Serial Port Assistant Tool in StellarMate now works with the GPS too:

I understand if automating such a thing is not an easy thing to do. I guess consider this thread a lesson on what to do if one has a USB GPS receiver and wants to have it reliably pass data into INDI/EKOS. The Stellarmate Serial Assistant was helpful in making the connection repeatable after reboot.