The ArcPad Team Blog

Unofficial stuff from the team behind the World's leading mobile GIS platform

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Simulate GPS for indoor training and demos

Some of you may already know about FakeGPS - it's been around for years.
FakeGPS is an extension for ArcPad that simulates a GPS feed. It reads longitude and latitude points (and optionally height values) from a text file and sends the points, one at a time, at a given interval, to ArcPad.
The points will appear to ArcPad as if they are coming from a GPS.

FakeGPS is available at:
http://arcscripts.esri.com/details.asp?dbid=13817 (or search for FakeGPS on arcscripts.esri.com).

You'll see instructions on how to use this extension, but the quick version is:
- Extract the zip file you download from ArcScripts.
- Place the appropriate DLL in the ArcPad Extensions folder:
FakeGPS7n.dll – Windows XP/Vista
FakeGPS7a.dll – Windows Mobile
- When you start ArcPad, go the GPS Properties dialog, and you’ll see the FakeGPS protocol as an option. Select this protocol.



To really make FakeGPS useful, you need a way to easily generate log files to use as inputs. I wrote a tool to help generate these log files and published it as an applet on ArcScripts at:
http://arcscripts.esri.com/details.asp?dbid=16299

This FakeGPSLogTool applet allows you to select any line or polygon feature in a map and use its vertices to generate a FakeGPS log file.
You can then use the log file with the FakeGPS extension to simulate a GPS feed for indoor training or demos.