Recent talk in the ESP thread got me thinking and I believe an open GNSS file format would be really useful for the speedsurfing community.

Due to my personal background as a long-time software developer and familiarity with GNSS data, I decided to share some ideas. Long story cut short, I've done an extensive brain dump and created a project on GitHub as the basis for a possible standard.

The project is by no means the finished article, merely the fruits of a few hours work since the topic first arose yesterday. However, I think the project on GitHub should be a good platform for further discussions.

Warning: This link is only for the software and data geeks amongst you!

github.com/Logiqx/open-gnss

Great initative. Open source/open formats are the best for users. But how do we promote adoption? Corporations don't like open formats and I'm not certain many people in the windsurfing community know what an open format is.

I think this will mainly apply to the DIY community, at first anyway.
There's an increasing numbers of Jans' esp32s being built and they have been banned from using OAO format.
Later on others may take it up.

[...] and they didn't take an offer to use OAO against proper credits, some small efforts to avoid impersonating Motions and commitment to non-commercial use.

I won't be participating but appreciate the effort.

Select to expand quote

Shifu said..
Great initative. Open source/open formats are the best for users. But how do we promote adoption? Corporations don't like open formats and I'm not certain many people in the windsurfing community know what an open format is.

It has a long way to go yet (little more than a brain dump) but it's a start. I have my own use-cases for a format that can losslessly retain data from any other known GPS device / format.

The ESP team obviously want to use a format smaller than UBX. They may choose to define a "minimal" format based on the open format, just treating it as "fixed".

My primary focus is enough flexibility to store a wide array of GPS / GNSS and sensor data, without loss of precision, regardless of the logging device, CPU architecture (e.g. endianness, 16/32 bit) or the GPS / GNSS chipset.

Making the format flexible does introduce some complexity but it is nowhere near as hideous as the internals of the FIT format.