u-blox 9 positioning receivers configuration library and tool

Copyright (c) Philippe Kehl (flipflip at oinkzwurgl dot org)

https://oinkzwurgl.org/hacking/ubloxcfg

This implements a library (API) do deal with the new configuration interface introduced in u-blox 9 positioning receivers (see references in ubloxcfg-50-ublox.jsonc).

A command line cfgtool is provided to configure a receiver from the configuration defined in a human-readable configuration file, as well as a few other functions.

The tool uses a number of small libraries (a UBX/NMEA/RTCM3 message parser, a serial port library, a receiver control library, and some other things), which could be useful for other projects.

The configuration library is thread-safe, free of dynamic memory allocation and written in c (ISO C99 with no further dependencies).

The configuration tool and the other libraries use some gcc/libc stuff ("GNU99").

This is tested in Linux (GCC). Some of it might work on Windows (using Mingw-w64). I wouldn't know...

Building

Linux

To build and run the tests:

make test

To build the command line tool:

make cfgtool

To build the API documentation:

make doc

To build the tests and the tool for Windows:

make test.exe
make cfgtool.exe

To get a list of all build targets:

make help

See the Makefile for details.

You may need to install some dependencies:

sudo apt-get install gcc gcc-multilib perl libpath-tiny-perl libdata-float-perl mingw-w64 doxygen

Windows

GCC, Make, Perl, etc. for Windows is available from mingw-w64.org.

Building as a library (Linux)

Parts of this can be compiled as a shared library:

make libubloxcfg.so
sudo make install-library  # for installing in /usr/local, or:
make install-library LIBPREFIX=/tmp/some/where

Alternatively, use cmake:

cmake -S cmake -B build/libubloxcfg -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/where/the/library/should/go
make -C build/libubloxcfg
make -C build/libubloxcfg install

Configuration definitions

The definitions for the configuration items (parameters) have been taken from u-blox manuals and converted into a JSON file (with comments): ubloxcfg-50-ublox.jsonc.

The ubloxcfg_gen.pl script converts this to c source code: ubloxcfg_gen.h and ubloxcfg_gen.c.

Configuration library

The configuration library provides the following:

• Type definitions for configuration items (size, data types, IDs)
• Functions to look up information on a configuration item (by name, by ID)
• Functions to help configuring output message rates.
• Helper macros to define lists of key-value pairs
• Functions to encode lists of key-value pairs into configuration data (and the reverse)
• Functions to stringify configuration items
• A function to convert strings into values

See ubloxcfg.h or the generated HTML documentation for details and examples.

Tool

The cfgtool command line tool can do the following:

• Configure a receiver from a configuration text file
• Receiver connection on local serial ports, remote raw TCP/IP ports or telnet (incl. RFC2217) connections
• Retrieve configuration from a receiver
• Convert a config text file into UBX-CFG-VALSET messages, output as binary UBX messages, u-center compatible hex dumps, or c code
• Display receiver navigation status
• And more...

Run cfgtool -h or see cfgtool.txt for more information.

GUI

A very experimental GUI is available. See here.

Licenses

• Configuration library (ubloxcfg): GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), see ubloxcfg/LICENSE
• Configuration tool (cfgtool), configuration GUI (cfggui) and the other libraries (ff): GNU General Public License (GPL), see ff/LICENSE
• Various third-party code comes with its own license, see 3rdparty/ and below

See the individual source files, scripts and other files for details.

Todo, ideas

• Document ff_* better.
• Fix FIXMEs and TODOs. :)