A few months ago, Cathy & I bought a Globalsat DG-100 Data Logger straight from the local distributor in Taiwan. I was pretty thrilled with it until I tried hooking it up to my powerbook and learned that Globalsat only wrote their lousy, buggy software for PC.

An exhaustive web search turned up a few surprise results from friends Boris Mann and Richard Eriksson (neither of whom had luck with the device either) and unfortunately not much else. There was talk of coming support for the DG-100 in GPSBabel, but the "coming soon" tag had been up for months with no results. Update (09/03/08): GPS babel has recently released a new version with DG-100 support!! (skip this hack, and go download the new version!)

Recently I stumbled across a beautiful C script written by Mirko Parthey that had it pretty much figured out. I hacked together a GPX output function and my DG-100 and my Mac are now very good friends!

First, you will need to grab the PL2303 USB to serial driver from sourceforge. Then download (or install from CD) Xcode from Apple.

Once you're done, grab my revised copy of Mirko Parthey's dg100.c which includes several small bug fixes and GPX output mode and you're ready to go. Compile the program with gcc dg100.c -o dg100read and run it from terminal using ./dg100read > myGPSfile.gpx to redirect output to file. To change device functions (read/delete/etc), uncomment the desired lines from the script and recompile.

Its pretty unglamorous, but it's simple, reliable and it works on a mac.

A few things to note:

- Don't fall into the trap of only installing Xcode gcc! you need the header & library files. Install it all!

- The DG-100 mounts on my system as /dev/cu.PL2303-3B1. If this is different for you, cd to /dev/ and find the appropriate device name and stick it in the C script.

- The PL2303 drivers are a little strange. The USB port you have the DG-100 connected to will affect it's device name. "3B1" is the address of my powerbook's right-side USB port. You'll either have to keep using the same USB port, or recompile if you ever need to change ports.

- sometimes port_close() doesn't end the session with the DG-100 properly. If the program stops responding normally, just reboot the DG-100.

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