I’ve searched in other threads and haven’t been able to find a clear answer. I would like connect Rover_A to Base_Station_A and Rover_B to Base_Station_B because they are in different geographical locations. But it doesn’t seem like that is possible with the Emlid caster because all (10) rovers use the same username and password. Do I just use the different mount point name of each base station (but still use the same username and password) on each rover? Is the free caster version is limited to corrections for a single geographical location?
Other questions that will help clear up my confusion: The Emlid caster says you can connect 10 rovers to 5 mount points at the same time. It’s unclear to me if all 10 rovers are connected to all 5 mounts points. If so, i don’t understand the use case of having more than one mount point (base station). Is the term for “mount points” and “base stations” interchangeable?
When you have several mount points enabled, the caster will automatically create the nearest mount point and your client’s rovers will automatically connect to the closest available base station.
Does it work the same way for the free version? For example, does each rover just know which mount point to use based on which one it is closest to?
Apologies for the radio silence. In simpler terms, mount points and base stations could be used interchangeably. One mount point typically corresponds to one base station.
In Emlid Caster, you can use up to 5 bases, each with one assigned mount point, but you can only connect ten rovers in total.
The nearest mount point is only available in Caster Pro. For the free version, you would need to specify the mount point to which your rover should connect to.
Just to follow through for anyone asking the same questions, I verified that you can connect Rover_A to Base_Station_A and Rover_B to Base_Station_B independently. You use the same address, port, username, and password credentials on all the rovers, but you use a different mount point credential on each rover depending on which base station you want to use for that rover.
It was a bit deceiving for me on the Emlid Caster UI because:
when you only have one mount point activated in the My mount points section, only that one shows up in the My rovers mount point field. But as soon as you active (flip the toggle switch) more than one mount point in My mount points, then the mount point field in the My rovers section shows MP*** which implies that more than one mount point is active for the rovers. In other words, the UI doesn’t do a good job of telling you which rover is connected to which mount point.
Also,
the mount point naming threw me off because all the mount points start with the same number but end with a different letter. So I wasn’t sure if they were all somehow the same “mount point network”. This confusion was originally exacerbated due to my first confusion above. But now I know that they are all separate mount points with no sense of a network since the automatic mount point selection is part of the Caster Pro version.
This is all likely a confusion that I caused myself, but hopefully this is useful to someone else.
You could make the My rovers section view look similar to the way that the My mount points section view looks. For example,
have one row for each rover instead of combining them all into x/10. And in the adjacent column, instead of the password for each mount point, it could show the mount point being used for each rover.
List all the mount points with letters at the end so they all have the same naming format.
On the right-hand side of both the My mount points and My rovers sections where the instructions/credential summary are shown, instead of showing the value of the mount point in the MOUNT POINT field, you could have it point to the the table on the left-hand side somehow since its redundant info. Either with text (“See mount point in left table”) or maybe just list all the active mount points. It just doesn’t seem helpful when multiple mount points are toggled on and it hides the mount points with the three dots. It may or may not make sense to do the same for the Password field just in the My mount points instructions/credential summary section.
These are all obviously suggestions and I’m sure there are reasons for why the UI looks the way it does now, but this is coming from the perspective of a new user using multiple mount points on multiple rovers, for what it’s worth.
Thanks for asking these questions and outlining the process.
Can I suggest that the manuals, blogs, and apps all simply use the same naming and then bullet point the inputs? I’d consider this Caster for Idiots, and if you need a volunteer Idiot, I’m your ID-10-T error person!!
