Hello, greetings from Northern California. A lot of home time these days. I have a small RC Boat and I have the Reach M+ and a pixhawk 2. I purchased the optional pixhawk 2 jst cable with the M+
If anyone else has done a similar setup , please share any setup things I’m missing. I will go out again tomorrow, I made a few mission planner tweaks I saw in a Emlid setup guide.
I have the JST cable going from the S1 port to the GPS2 on the Pixhawk2 , This does not seem to be enough to power the M+. Only the red like comes on for a bit, then it goes off. When powered with the micro USB it works fine. That i can work around, but it would be nice not using the USB.
I did more testing today. The M+ seems to be working great 22 satellites on its own. When I plug the jst from S1 port into the pixhawk 2 GPS 2 port , I lose all satellites and position in the app. Also I I tried to put it in the telem2 plug , same thing all satellites lost in app. The telem 2 port did have enough juice to power the M+ so that’s interesting.
Has anyone used the M+ in the pixhawk2 ? Any help would be great
PixHawk may not provide enough power for Reach M+. Reach M+ device requires a stable power source to operate properly. That’s why our general recommendation is to provide Reach M+ with an additional power source while integrating with PixHawk.
I have been powering the M+ with the USB and battery separate. On its own it seems to work great. When I plug in the optional jst cable for the pixhawk2 from S1 to GPS2 I lose everything. position stops showing in the app.
Update: I’m sure at one point others will be doing this.
The M+ needs to be powered from the USB dont bother trying to power from the pixhawk2 plugs like GPS2 or Telem. I will buy a 6" male to male micro usb and power the M+ from the cube micro usb slot.
I used the optional jst wire sold by Emlid for the pixhawk2. It goes from the S1 port to the GPS2 port on the pix hawk. Since they dont want the M+ powered twice, I pulled all wires except RX and TX .
My boat shape is at least showing in mission planner , its hopping around, I hope to get .5 - 1 meter stand alone accuracy, thats all i need to follow survey lines. I’ll do more testing and play around with some settings.
update
So I have it working, for the most part, without any added corrections, stand alone I get it around 1m accuracy, which is fine for following grid lines. ( Note: We use a more accurate RTK RS2 for the actual depth survey data.) Sometimes its just not usable, bad satellite conditions, thick dark moist cloud cover, whatever. I think thats normal.
The M+ needs to be powered from the USB dont bother trying to power from the pixhawk2 plugs like GPS2 or Telem. Power using USB with a external power supply.
I used the optional jst wire sold by Emlid for the pixhawk2. It goes from the S1 port to the GPS2 port on the pix hawk. Since they dont want the M+ powered twice, I pulled all wires except RX and TX and ground
My boat shape is showing in mission planner when we get a fix, I am not in an ideal location, at one point my position was hopping around i raised the external antenna 2 feet and it was night and day, so im confident in an open area it will perform much better.
param GPS_type2 set to 13 for ERD
Another option for more accurate GPS fix in the pixhawk2 is to run a 9 pin hard cable from the RS2 , run through a TTL converter and bring into the pixhawk GPS1 port.
