gpsfake - test harness for gpsd, simulating a GPS

gpsfake is a test harness for gpsd and its clients. It opens a pty (pseudo-TTY), launches a gpsd instance that thinks the slave side of the pty is its GPS device, and repeatedly feeds the contents of a test logfile through the master side to the GPS.

gpsfake does not require root privileges, and can be run concurrently with a production gpsd instance without causing problems.

The logfile may be of NMEA, SiRF-II packets, or Zodiac packets. Leading lines beginning with # will be treated as comments and ignored.

The gpsd instance is run in foreground. The thread sending fake GPS data to the daemon is run in background.

The -b option enables a twirling-baton progress indicator on standard error. At termination, it reports elaped time.

The -c option sets the delay between sentences in seconds. Fractional values of seconds are legal. The default is zero (no delay).

The -l option makes the program dump a line or packet number just before each sentence is fed to the daemon. If the sentence is textual (e.g. NMEA, the text is dumped as well).

The -i option is for single-stepping through logfiles. It dumps the line or packet number (and the sentence if the protocol is textual) followed by "? ". Only when the user keys Enter is the line actually fed to gpsd.

The -m option specifies a monitor program inside which the daemon should be run. This option is intended to be used with valgrind(1), gdb(1) and similar programs.

The -o option specifies options to pass to the daemon. Passing "-n" is often useful. The -D option passes a -D option to the daemon: thus -D 4 is shorthand for -o "-D 4".

The -p option dumps the NMEA and GPSD notifications generated by the log to standard output. The logfile is interpreted once only. (This option is intended to facilitate regression testing.)

The -r option specifies an initialization comand to use. The defaylt is "w+r+"; "r=2" might be another interesting value.

The -s option sets the baud rate for the slave tty. The default is 4800.

The -h option makes gpsfake print a usage message and exit.

The argument must be the name of a file containing the data to be cycled at the device. gpsfake will print a notification each time it cycles.

gpsfake is a trivial wrapper around a Python module, also named gpsfake, that can be used to fully script sessions involving a gpsd instance, any number of client sessions, and any number of fake GPSes feeding the daemon instance with data from specified sentence logs.

Source and embedded documentation for this module is shipped with the gpsd development tools. You can use it to torture-test either gpsd itself or any gpsd-aware client application.

gpsd(8), xgps(1), libgps(3), libgpsd(3), gpsprof(1), gnuplot(1).

Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>. There is a project page for gpsd here: http://gpsd.berlios.de/.