Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Jack on February 29, 2012 at 10:24am

Yes there is a way, I have done that to my APM2s. I wanted to leave the Doughter board in place for the Mag and disable the MTK. I found it was easy to cut a GPS TX trace on the board and that would disable that GPS so I could plug in a remote GPS to the port on the main board. This mod is prety easy and if you want to go back to the original you just solder a bridge on the trace. I dont have the unit with me at the moment but when I get home I will take a pic of my mod and you can see if it is somthing you would like to do.

 

Jack

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Permalink Reply by bret on March 24, 2012 at 8:15am

Any chance you'll post a pic to show which trace to cut? Thanks.

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Permalink Reply by Jake Stew on March 30, 2012 at 11:56pm

Cutting on your board?  That doesn't sound like a good idea.

Why not just ask the dev team?  Sounds like about 3 minutes of coding to me if it's not already implemented.  I'm sure they'd do that for even a couple users rather than have you cutting on the hardware.

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Permalink Reply by flying on March 31, 2012 at 12:17am

Coding would work if the onboard gps and external gps connects to different serial port. But from the current codes, it seems as if they share the same serial port(ie the data and supply traces for both the onboard and external gps are parallel, or am I wrong?)

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Permalink Reply by Jake Stew on March 31, 2012 at 12:55am

I guess that could be a problem.  I don't recall any NMEA commands to turn off the GPS off the top of my head either.

Looking at the schematics... I guess I don't understand where the external GPS would plug in.  The daughterboard takes up all the pins with either the internal or external option, so it has to plug into some other header pins.  There's three serial ports on the unit, so unless you need all three it would be easy to plug your external GPS into one of the others.

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Permalink Reply by flying on March 31, 2012 at 1:50am

Aren't all 3 serial ports in use?
Telemetry uses one, usb uses one, and one more for gps........

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Permalink Reply by Jake Stew on March 31, 2012 at 2:14am

The atmega chip has onboard usb.  So it's not using one for USB.

For now, I'd suggest clipping the two pins between board and module rather than cutting traces on the board.  It's really easy to solder in a new header pin for most people, but potentially impossible for them to repair a cut trace.

Looking top down on everything the pins would be the top row, right-most two pins.

As an alternative, if anyone wants the GPS removed from their board I'd be more than happy to do it in exchange for the GPS module.  I'd pay return shipping and I do have a unit on order that I'd trade if I screwed up (I've done plenty of PCB rework).

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Permalink Reply by Christof Schmid on April 16, 2012 at 1:10pm

Hi Jake

Good point.

I have two APM2 from preorder and I need my GPS away from the APM2.

Could you please post a pict / drawing to make sure I cut the right pins.

 

Or maybe Chris has a solution for preorders meanwhile. 

Thanks. 

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Permalink Reply by James on May 8, 2012 at 10:52am

i found this comment back in the presentation post,

 Comment by Chris Anderson on December 1, 2011 at 12:16am

Martin: yes, you can either order the version without the GPS on the daughterboard and use an external one, or use the standard board and solder a jumper on the bottom of the board and disable the built-in GPS so you can use an external GPS instead.

but never found which jumber and were.. iam realy desperate cause my internal GPS stoped working..

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Permalink Reply by DJ Raz55 on April 13, 2012 at 3:29am

Please post a picture

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Permalink Reply by flying on February 29, 2012 at 3:57pm

Wow ok thanks!

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Permalink Reply by Damian ONeill on March 1, 2012 at 5:42am

Thanks for the question. I hotly on here to ask the same question.
I want to take apm2 off my aud and put it in a Bicler with the camera chassis and need to get the gos external. I am hopeless with the soldering iron so I hope it's a simple process 

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