We have a couple of RS2 units we use for ground surveying. But we’re getting into drone imaging and we’re looking at getting a DJI Matrice 600 to pair with a MIcaSense Dual Camera (RGB) sensor (Resources - AgEagle Aerial Systems Inc.).
I know DJI is a bitch to hook up with and some Emlid units don’t work with them. This might be a newbie question, but how would we hook up the M2 to the Matrice 600? Would we plug it directly into the sensors? Can we hook up the M2 via LoRa or just do the corrections in post? Or does that create an issue for when the camera is capturing the images?
The nice thing about Emlid is that it can be modular (on demand) and completely independent of the drone and run PPK. The big factor for more integration is - Can you connect to the camera to capture the shutter actuation time? If not then we have to figure out how that event is going to be written to the GPS flight log. If RTK writing to the image at the point of capture can’t be achieved then there is no reason for RTK as you would have to rewrite the geotags anyways.
I have a Yuneec H520 that utilizes the M2 as a module and I take a couple of sync shots in order to rewrite the geotags according to the PPK’d values. I can easily get 10cm accuracy and 5-7cm by using GCP’s. I have to use them anyways in order to tie my survey to other localized information.
I would suggest to start this way as it is the most inexpensive way to start ingesting the data and kind of workflow you will be introducing. Sometimes it sounds complicated, but it really is easy once you have done it a couple of times, especially since you are already familiar with the hardware and it sounds like surveying in general.
If you want to get camera time marks, you’ll need to connect M2’s trigger wire to the camera somehow. From the article Michael’s posted I can say that another MicaSense camera - RedEdge - has a GPS port, particularly for shutter signal output.
With the RedEdge-MX dual system, the idea is the same - to send the shutter signal from the camera to the Reach M2. The RedEdge-MX User Guide says, that there’s one specific PPS pin, that you should be able to toggle to output mode. However, I was unable to find where’s this PPS pin located. Probably, the user manual included with a camera contains more information regarding that.
