If you’re looking for an easy and free way to test your GPS enabled device, you’ve come to the right place. As you know, simply going out on the road and testing your system live takes a long time, it’s limited to your geographical area, and due to the constantly moving satellite paths, you can never repeat a test twice.
However, investing in a full GPS simulator is expensive. So we thought we’d produce some free software to make your GPS device testing faster and more effective.
You can use the software to stream synthesised NMEA data into your target device, replacing the serial output from a GPS engine.
This means you can create a driving or flying scenario anywhere in the world, at any height, and at any speed, and test your device with realistic data.
It is easy to create your own NMEA data simply by sketching out a route anywhere in the world in Google Earth, and then importing the Google Earth KML file into the SatGen software.
The software will then turn your rough sketch into a fully realistic journey, filling in any gaps and smoothing out any sharp corners. This data is saved to file and can also be output on a serial port at an update rate specified by the user.
If you want to more precisely define your own speed, route and height profile, you can use the User Commands input to write simple scripts which are translated into very accurate NMEA data.
The free software is fully functional except for a single, static advert at the bottom. It has a similar front end as our full SatGen scenario creation software.