I wanted to test the old gpskit gps rece ... / 2011-03-31

I wanted to test the old gpskit gps receiver I originally bought for wardriving with the shednet computer. I had the gps antenna on the roof of the shed and the gps module inside and wanted to hook up the serial cable to the back of the PC.

One minor detail: the PC only has one serial port...

[   12.874582] serial8250: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
[   12.875353] 00:07: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A

which is in use by the weather station in the shed. So.. back into the crate with old but usable computer hardware with the gpskit.

What is it with modern PCs and the shortage of serial ports (or complete lack of them). I want to test gps timekeeping over serial, so usb to serial is not usable (introduces jitter). Time to make sure the planned hardware for project sundial has enough 'real' serial ports.

And it has, the dmesg for an alix.1c mainboard from the wardriving box shows the right answer:

Serial: 8250/16550 driver $Revision: 1.90 $ 4 ports, IRQ sharing disabled
serial8250: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
serial8250: ttyS1 at I/O 0x2f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
00:07: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
00:08: ttyS1 at I/O 0x2f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A