An exciting update from the Swiftnav team, whose successful Kickstarter project is bringing high-precision (cm-level) RTK GPS to an affordable level (sub $1,000). First up: ArduPilot support!
From today's update:
The complete signal processing chain, from the GPS radio waves that arrive at Piksi's antenna, to the centimeter-accurate relative positions that are the system's output, has now been fully implemented and verified.
Ian says these are the covariance plots of the ambiguity resolution engine, but all I see are some cool circles.
There is still work to be done to port that code to the Piksi hardware. This is a decent chunk of software development, but we're now in the homestretch. Software development timelines are always difficult to estimate, so we want to make sure we avoid pushing the delivery date again by being too optimistic about the schedule. With this in mind, we're promising you a ship-by date of April 15th for the Production RTK Kits.
A sunny San Francisco afternoon, our dual antenna setup taking in the rays
We've added a new member to our team, one Niels Joubert of Stanford's computer science department. He's an amazing software developer and engineer, and we're very lucky to have him making contributions to the product. Some of you will be pleased to hear that his first project is adding support for Piksi to the Ardupilot system. This support is an utmost priority for us, and now we can finally give it the resources it deserves.
Niels Joubert / Piksi / 3DR Pixhawk
We've now finished shipping all the SUPPORT and T SHIRT rewards, so if you haven't received yours yet, it should be arriving soon.
Thank you for your continued support and patience!
Colin and Fergus
Comments
As far as I know:
Yes
No
I have a practical question. Let's assume I fly with Piksi RTK outside the 3DR radio range. Does then the onboard Piksi module revert back to "normal" GPS mode ?
Another question : does the onboard module include a compass ? (so as to be able to replace the 3DR GPS+Compass external module) ?
Dear Chris, this is great news, is it available a tutorial for configuration and usage of the RTK GPS?
Thank you!!!
Marc: I believe the electronics are below the GPS and telemetry antennae. These components don't require a lot of space. It's probably based on the same architecture as the AR Drone.
Chris si the Swift RTK plug and play or must everything be configured etc?
haha Adam sorry i ment the Ebee is so small as it is compared to many other flying wing platforms and i only see hatches for Camera and Battery, where is the hatch for electronics?
Marc: senseFly never really had to jam anything into an eBee to support RTK ;)
The RTK units are shipping now.
Any more news on this? What are the Sensefly guys using and how do they jam a flight system into a tiny Ebee?
It is already April 19. You said above that "we're promising you a ship-by date of April 15th for the Production RTK Kits." Now, where can we buy this?
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