Yesterday we were using our emlids Reach RS+ for most of the day and had some issues that seem to relate to the temperature, our vehicle indicated that out side temp was 34C and we got a few screen shots of the internal temps:
You can also see some weirdness that we were experiencing, such as age of correction being “-43.3 sec”, other things that we had included:
No live updates to the signal strength of the GNSS;
In ability to load the survey;
Incorrect location displayed (lat, long and elevation);
So, what is the maximum internal temps that we can expect to still have performance form the emlids?
What can we do to help lower the internal temps? (bearing in mind that we are just at the start of summer at the moment);
What have others done to try and cool down the emlids Reach RS+?
We would take the rover and bring it into the vehicle and blast it with cold air from the aircon, but that isn’t great as the temp quickly climbs again, we have limited view of the sky and discontinuities in the logs.
Only the rover seems to have the issues, after turning off the rover, cooling it in the air flow in the car and starting back up, we would be able to use it again for about 10 minutes. The base was about 2km as the crow flies, much further by the road ways.
When we returned to the base at the end of the pick up, it was still working, and had a slightly lower internal temp than the rover, but we can’t confirm any issues with the base as we had no direct access to it.
I bet which ever one is the Rover will get hotter. One, you have the heat reflecting off the surface so it’s 360 radiation and rovers in general do this. They do allot more calculations and are constantly pinging not only it’s own satellites, but that of the base.
Ok, we had another scorcher of a day. The vehicles temp gauge said that the outside temp was climbing past 44 degrees and the internal temp of the rover was approaching 57 degrees before it shutdown. We had both the base station and the rover go into some form of thermal shutdown.
At this point we packed up the electronics and headed back into an air-coned building and watched as the temps outside went to about 50 degrees Celsius. This happened on 2 consecutive days, only difference was the 2nd day only the base shutdown as the rover was in and out of the vehicle and was able to cool down.
So it would appear (at least for us) that a maximum outside temp of 43 degrees and an internal temp of above 56 degrees should mean that we shutdown the equipment and get out of the heat.
