gpsbabel pain

As I wrote back in November, I’ve successfully managed to connect my ancient Garmin GPS device to my Macbook Pro using a Serial-to-USB adapter thing and the gpsbabel tool. “Successfully” is a bit of a stretch here, because gpsbabel sometimes acts wonky and refuses to play nice. Following are the lessons I learned recently.

• If gpsbabel tells you “[ERROR] A800_Off: Not acknowledged“, ignore it. In most cases, the import will still work. If it doesn’t, try again.
• If gpsbabel tells you “GARMIN:Can’t get waypoint from /dev/cu.usbserial“, try again until it works. I suspect this has something to do with the way to GPS adapter, the OS X driver stuff and gpsbabel interact: Sometimes the device is sort of not registered with the operating system and things fail. Seconds later it works again.
• The same applies for the error “GARMIN:Can’t init /dev/cu.usbserial“. Try again or if it refuses to work after let’s say a dozen attempts, unplug and reconnect the adapter to your computer.

As you see, repeatedly launching gpsbabel helps a lot. Go figure.

To ease the importing, I’m using the following shell script:

#!/bin/sh

TODAY=`date +%Y-%m-%d`

if [ "$1" = "tracks" ]
then
        ~/bin/gpsbabel -t -i garmin -f /dev/cu.usbserial -o gpx -F $TODAY-$1.gpx
else
        ~/bin/gpsbabel -w -i garmin -f /dev/cu.usbserial -o gpx -F $TODAY-$1.gpx
fi

Call it either as “./import.sh waypoints” or “./import.sh tracks“, depending on what you want to load from the device.