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SwiftNav Piksi Intergration with Pixhawk - Success

Posted by Christopher Rice on January 31, 2016 at 4:58pm

I'm posting this here as a resource for anyone who has also invested in the Swift Navigation Piksi chipset for RTK flight. After a few weeks of configuring/testing, I finally was able to get everything working, and have achieved RTK flight mode, and so far its very impressive. Please feel free to bounce any questions off me. I'd be glad to help out. My test platform is an old (but rugged) DJI F550.

Attached some photos of the unit itself, and mounted with the external GPS on the ground plane slightly above the uBlox. 

Additionally, if there are any other RTK systems out there, would love to hear about them!

CR

piksi.jpg

550rtk.jpg

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Replies

  • Luis Gutierrez January 18, 2017 at 11:17am

    Hi Christopher,

    I have a few question...if you can help me:

    1.- Which version of Piksi did you use? "Piski multi" or only "Piksi"

    2.- How accurate is it? many say centimeter accurate, but 1cm - 10cm - 50 cm aprox?

    3.- How much time does it take to get that level of accuracy? I read about the convergence time on the Piksi webpage and for "Piksi Multi" it says it needs only seconds to converge, but for "piksi" it takes minutes to converge.

    I ask because I want to use Piksi with a Pixhawk (into a drone) to precise navigate with them. But I'm a little afraid because of this convergence time. Can  you please explain a little more about the accuracy and needed to reach it.


    Regards

  • Jose Alberto Soler February 29, 2016 at 3:10pm

    Thanks for sharing you experience.

    I am trying to decide between a Piksi and a Reach RTK. What do you think is the best solution and why?

    • Marcus > Jose Alberto Soler March 1, 2016 at 1:01pm

      I have used both of the units. I would not have purchased the EMLID Reach units if I had more success with the PIKSI units.   The interface and experience has been simpler and with better results on the REACH.   I have not picked up the PIKSI in a while, and perhaps it has gotten better and more reliable and simpler, but my experience has been REACH > PIKSI (although they haven't released camera trigger/Pixhwak integration yet for the REACH units). 

      • Jose Alberto Soler > Marcus March 3, 2016 at 11:51am

        Thanks for the information Marcus, much appreciated

  • Thomas Mueller February 16, 2016 at 4:07pm

    Hello,

    where you able to use it with Qgroundcontrol or only in Mission Planner?

    How does the vehicle behave, e.g. during an auto mission, when the rtk fix is lost and it moves to float?

    • Christopher Rice > Thomas Mueller February 16, 2016 at 9:44pm

      Hi Thomas;

      I used Mission Planner; the GPSSTATUS2 changes from 1 (standard uBlox fallback) to 4 (float) to 5 (Fixed RTK). 

      The drone is very accurate in RTK mode as you can imagine, but I haven't noticed much difference between that and Float mode. I did pull some lat/longs from the log with both 4/5 status and compared them, slight difference. It's VERY important to know your base station position that you should know with <1cm accuracy - using of course, an RTK receiver!

      Hope this helps!

      • Thomas Mueller > Christopher Rice February 19, 2016 at 4:20am

        Hi Christopher,

        I need to use the piksi with qgroundcontrol and was hoping there was away to realize this...

        • Christopher Rice > Thomas Mueller February 19, 2016 at 8:03am

          Not familiar with QGroundcontrol, sorry can't be more of a resource on that.

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