= Motorola ONCORE - The Shared Memory Interface
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== Introduction

In NMEA mode, the Oncore GPS receiver provides the user with the same
information as other GPS receivers. In BINARY mode, it can provide a lot
of additional information.

In particular, you can ask for satellite positions, satellite health,
signal levels, the ephemeris and the almanac, and you can set many
operational parameters. In the case of the VP, you can get the
pseudorange corrections necessary to act as a DGPS base station, and you
can see the raw satellite data messages themselves.

When using the Oncore GPS receiver with NTP, this additional information
is usually not available since the receiver is only talking to the
oncore driver in _ntpd_. To make this information available for use in
other programs, (say graphic displays of satellites positions, plots of
SA, etc.), a shared memory interface (SHMEM) has been added to the
refclock_oncore driver on those operating systems that support shared
memory.

To make use of this information you will need an Oncore Reference Manual
for the Oncore GPS receiver that you have. The Manual for the VP only
exists as a paper document, the UT+/GT+/M12 manuals are available as a
pdf documents at http://www.synergy-gps.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=35&Itemid=60[Synergy] .

This interface was written by Poul-Henning Kamp (phk@FreeBSD.org), and
modified by Reg Clemens (reg@dwf.com). The interface is known to work in
FreeBSD, Linux, and Solaris.

== Activating the Interface

Although the Shared Memory Interface will be compiled into the Oncore
driver on those systems where Shared Memory is supported, to activate
this interface you must include a *STATUS* or *SHMEM* line in the
+/etc/ntp.oncore+ data file that looks like

----------------------------
        STATUS < file_name >

        or

        SHMEM < file_name >
----------------------------

Thus a line like

--------------------------------------
        SHMEM /var/adm/ntpstats/ONCORE
--------------------------------------

would be acceptable. This file name will be used to access the Shared
Memory.

In addition, one the two keywords *Posn2D* and *Posn3D* can be added to
see @@Ea records containing the 2D or 3D position of the station (see
below). Thus to activate the interface, and see 3D positions, something
like

--------------------------------------
        SHMEM /var/adm/ntpstats/ONCORE
        Posn3D
--------------------------------------

would be required.

== Storage of Messages in Shared Memory

With the shared memory interface, the oncore driver (refclock_oncore)
allocates space for all of the messages that it is configured to
receive, and then puts each message in the appropriate slot in shared
memory as it arrives from the receiver. Since there is no easy way for a
client program to know when the shared memory has been updated, a
sequence number is associated with each message, and is incremented when
a new message arrives. With the sequence number it is easy to check
through the shared memory segment for messages that have changed.

The Oncore binary messages are kept in their full length, as described
in the Reference manual, that is everything from the @@ prefix through the
<checksum><CR><LF>.

The data starts at location ONE of SHMEM (NOT location ZERO).

The messages are stacked in a series of variable length structures, that
look like

----------------------------------------
        struct message {
                unsigned int   length;
                unsigned char  sequence;
                unsigned char  message[length];
        }
----------------------------------------

if something like that were legal. That is, there are two bytes
(caution, these may NOT be aligned with word boundaries, so the field
needs to be treated as a pair of unsigned char), that contains the length of
the next message. This is followed by a unsigned char sequence number, that is
incremented whenever a new message of this type is received. This is
followed by \'length' characters of the actual message.

The next structure starts immediately following the last char of the
previous message (no alignment). Thus, each structure starts a distance
of \'length+3' from the previous structure.

Following the last structure, is an unsigned int containing a zero length to
indicate the end of the data.

The messages are recognized by reading the headers in the data itself,
viz @@Ea or whatever.

There are two special cases.

(1) The almanac takes a total of 34 submessages all starting with @@Cb. +
35 slots are allocated in shared memory. Each @@Cb message is initially
placed in the first of these locations, and then later it is moved to
the appropriate location for that submessage. The submessages can be
distinguished by the first two characters following the @@Cb header, and
new data is received only when the almanac changes.

(2) The @@Ea message contains the calculated location of the antenna,
and is received once per second. However, when in timekeeping mode, the
receiver is normally put in 0D mode, with the position fixed, to get
better accuracy. In 0D mode no position is calculated.

When the SHMEM option is active, and if one of *Posn2D* or *Posn3D* is
specified, one @@Ea record is hijacked each 15s, and the receiver is put
back in 2D/3D mode so the current location can be determined (for
position determination, or for tracking SA). The timekeeping code is
careful NOT to use the time associated with this (less accurate) 2D/3D
tick in its timekeeping functions.

Following the initial @@Ea message are 3 additional slots for a total of
four. As with the almanac, the first gets filled each time a new record
becomes available, later in the code, the message is distributed to the
appropriate slot. The additional slots are for messages containing 0D,
2D and 3D positions. These messages can be distinguished by different
bit patterns in the last data byte of the record.

== Opening the Shared Memory File

The shared memory segment is accessed through a file name given on a
*SHMEM* card in the +/etc/ntp.oncore+ input file. The following code
could be used to open the Shared Memory Segment:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        char *Buf, *file;
        int size, fd;
        struct stat statbuf;

        file = "/var/adm/ntpstats/ONCORE";  /* the file name on my ACCESS card */
        if ((fd=open(file, O_RDONLY)) < 0) {
                fprintf(stderr, "Can't open %s\n", file);
                exit(1);
        }

        if (stat(file, &statbuf) < 0) {
                fprintf(stderr, "Can't stat %s\n", file);
                exit(1);
        }

        size = statbuf.st_size;
        if ((Buf=mmap(0, size, PROT_READ, MAP_SHARED, fd, (off_t) 0)) < 0) {
                fprintf(stderr, "MMAP failed\n");
                exit(1);
        }
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

== Accessing the data

The following code shows how to get to the individual records.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        void    oncore_msg_Ea(), oncore_msg_As(), oncore_msg_Bb();

        struct Msg {
            char         c[5];
            unsigned int seq;
            void         (*go_to)(uchar *);
        };

        struct Msg Hdr[] = { {"@@Bb", 0, &oncore_msg_Bb},
                             {"@@Ea", 0, &oncore_msg_Ea},
                             {"@@As", 0, &oncore_msg_As}};

        void
        read_data()
        {
            int     i, j, k, n, iseq, jseq;
            uchar   *cp, *cp1;


            for(cp=Buf+1; (n = 256*(*cp) + *(cp+1)) != 0;  cp+=(n+3)) {
                for (k=0; k < sizeof(Hdr)/sizeof(Hdr[0]);  k++) {
                    if (!strncmp(cp+3, Hdr[k].c, 4)) {      /* am I interested? */
                        iseq = *(cp+2);
                        jseq = Hdr[k].seq;
                        Hdr[k].seq = iseq;
                        if (iseq > jseq) {              /* has it changed? */
                            /* verify checksum */
                            j = 0;
                            cp1 = cp+3;             /* points to start of oncore response */
                            for (i=2; i < n-3; i++)
                                j ^= cp1[i];
                            if (j == cp1[n-3]) {    /* good checksum */
                                    Hdr[k].go_to(cp1);
                            } else {
                                fprintf(stderr, "Bad Checksum for %s\n", Hdr[k].c);
                                break;
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }
                if (!strncmp(cp+3, "@@Ea", 4))
                    cp += 3*(n+3);
                if (!strncmp(cp+3, "@@Cb", 4))
                    cp += 34*(n+3);
            }
        }

        oncore_msg_Bb(uchar *buf)
        {
                /* process Bb messages */
        }

        oncore_msg_Ea(uchar *buf)
        {
                /* process Ea messages */
        }

        oncore_msg_As(uchar *buf)
        {
                /* process As messages */
        }
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The structure Hdr contains the Identifying string for each of the
messages that we want to examine, and the name of a program to call when
a new message of that type is arrives. The loop can be run every few
seconds to check for new data.

== Examples

There are two complete examples available. The first plots satellite
positions and the station position as affected by SA, and keeps track of
the mean station position, so you can run it for periods of days to get
a better station position. The second shows the effective horizon by
watching satellite tracks. The examples will be found in the GNU-zipped
tar file https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~ntp/ntp_spool/software/OncorePlot.tar.gz .

Try the new interface, enjoy.

'''''

Reg.Clemens (reg@dwf.com), Poul-Henning Kamp (phk@FreeBSD.org)

'''''

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