GNSS on AutoCAD

[PGia]

Hello,
I'm back here once again to bring up a very interesting topic:
How can AutoCAD (installed on a Windows 10 tablet with an integrated GNSS receiver) be made to display its real-time UTM position (or latitude/longitude), for example through a block?
Is this possible?
Are there any Lisp routines capable of achieving this?

[Steven P]

Not sure, can the GNSS write / overwrite or updated a text file continuously? Reading a text file is easy with CAD, copy that to a block and the rest is all possible -  not sure the interface yet.

 

BigAl might know something later today.

[PGia]

I don’t really understand how a GNSS receiver works.
It seems that most of them operate by sending data to a port.
The receiver is a u-blox device.

[mhupp]

Would need a Reactor and connect to some type of database.

Edited Friday at 06:54 PM by mhupp

[BIGAL]

Like @mhupp may need to run an external program that writes current location to a file, then you can read that file and update say text. Depending on the program may run a BAT file or run the program or use powershell to run. I think can look at a file date has changed via reactor but manual much easier.

 

I did a Google and did start to find hints of save to a txt or csv file but that is as far as I went. It is something you need to do, yje googling.  Talk to who you bought the device from they may have something.

[Danielm103]

I think you would need Python, .NET, or ObjectARX as Autolisp does not have an on idle event that I can see.

According to AI, you can read the input stream in a background thread, then use AutoCAD’s on idle event to update geometry in AutoCAD. I asked AI about using PyRx and it spit out a bunch of code converting $GPGGA $GNGGA to Lat/Log and stuff, I attached it.

 

scratch.txt

[PGia]

Thanks for the replies.
It seems that, despite the passage of time, this is still a very rarely discussed topic. I have only found one very old thread dealing with this issue, but it approaches it from VBA and does not appear to reach a solution:

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/autocad-map-3d-developer-forum/reading-gps-output-on-a-serial-port-with-vba/td-p/624634&ved=2ahUKEwif9v7MqpqVAxWuHDQIHXXNAncQFnoECCQQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2qjyYBboSx0JnXyKbmPsbU⁠�

I suppose this is not something that is easy to achieve from Lisp.
I’m not sure I fully understand the @BIGAL idea of using an external program: do you mean a program that does all the work from outside AutoCAD?
(I may not have understood correctly.)
Thanks, @Danielm103. I’ve never used Python with AutoCAD before. Perhaps this is the right time to start doing so 

 

I really think this topic deserves a thread that finally results in the solution that nobody has managed to find so far.