Bangle GPS via GadgetBrdige - state of play ?

[espruino-discuss2]

Posted at 2023-04-08 by HughB

Hi I am vaguely aware that some work had been done to get GPS coordinates from GadgetBridge instead of the onboard GPS on the Bangle 2.

I'm just not sure how to use this and get it to work.

I thought there was some automatic detection that the GPS values were coming via GadhetBridge and therefore the Bangle.on('GPS', func) would return the phones GPS cooerdinates. I unsed the gpswidget to monitor if the gps was turned on at all.

Can someone summarise where this work is at.
As no one appears to have managed to get the Bange 2 gps into low power mode or pedestrian mode I am intrested if this solution works.

Thanks
Hugh

[espruino-discuss2]

Posted at 2023-04-08 by @thyttan

If you're looking for PRs to Gadgetbridge you can find them among these: https://codeberg.org/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge/pulls?type=all&state=closed&labels=&milestone=0&assignee=0&poster=0&q=bangle

EDIT:

And here on the Bangle side:
https://github.com/espruino/BangleApps/pulls?q=%22gps+gadgetbridge%22+OR+%22gps+android%22

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Posted at 2023-04-09 by HughB

So I have the Bangle Version of Gadget bridge installed and the Android integration app.

I am trying to figure out which app on the Bangle will receive a lat and lon from my phone without powering on the gps chip on the Bangle.

A bit more information on this.

In the Android App the README says. Overwrite GPS - when GPS is requested by an app, this doesn't use Bangle.js's GPS but instead asks Gadgetbridge on the phone to use the phone's GPS.

However its not entirely clear what requested means here as app does not request the GPS position it has to use Bangle.on('GPS', func) as a callback.

I have noted that having this flag set means that no gps callbacks occur.
So how are apps mean't to work using the GPS position from gadgetbridge ?

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Posted at 2023-04-09 by HughB

I think @halemmerich was involved in this development so I am mentioning him here.

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Posted at 2023-04-15 by @halemmerich

Bangle.setGPSPower() is modified to handle the activation of the GPS sending by GadgetBridge. There is an open pull request that simplifies the code for using GPS by GadgetBridge and fixes some issues. The state in the pull request uses GPS events from the phone if they keep arriving and falls back to internal GPS if the last received GB-GPS event is too old.
From app perspective nothing changes in the use of GPS. setGPSPower for "requesting" GPS use and on('GPS',func) for getting the events. The combination Bangle.js GadgetBridge nightly and the PR works fine for me.
There are problems sending lots of messages to the Bangle, but I currently think that this is independent from GPS and a more generic problem with sending data via BT.

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Posted at 2023-04-15 by HughB

Thanks for the work on this. Any reason the PR is still draft ? Do you know when the GB changes will get released ?

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Posted at 2023-04-15 by @halemmerich

The reason for it being draft is the problems caused by sending a lot of data. There is currently no definitive cause found for this. I think it is not caused by the GPS code, but I can not prove that yet.
There are https://forum.espruino.com/conversations/384228/ and https://codeberg.org/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge/issues/2996 for more info on possible causes.

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Posted at 2023-04-18 by HughB

I wish you every success with this. These things are not for the feint hearted. Getting step counting to work kind of finished me off for trying anything too ambitious that required lots of testing.