Hi, I’m thinking about getting an RS3 because of the tilt comp, but I want to put it on a drone for a very special research project. In order to save weight, it might be helpful to remove the RS3s internal battery and power the device via the drones power supply (USB-C). And yes, I would sacrifice the IP rating for this project, no problem.
Could someone from EMLID please give a rough weight number of the internal battery? I don’t want to spend almost 3k & crack the thing open just to find out the weight reduction is not worth it 
Thanks a lot!
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Hi Vincent,
I recommend you use Reach M2 for this project. It doesn’t have an internal battery, weighs 35 g, and can be powered via USB-C from the drone’s power supply.
I’m wondering why you’re aiming to leverage the built-in tilt; yaw, pitch, roll values can be derived from the drone’s autopilot IMU sensor or an external one.
Could you please elaborate on that?
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Hi Kirill, well, that’s true, but if you don’t have access to all the internal data of the drone you are using, as we have had to deal with on a DJI drone, a sensor that does it all without having to deal with any code is pretty attractive.
But I just found out that IF we were to solve the task as I just envisioned, we would have to get an DJI AgrasT50 or something huge like that, so a few 100g of weight wouldn’t even matter.
The idea was to track the position of a long rod in 3D space, so I’d just put an RS3 as is on top and have all the data without syncing two streams on a millisecond level. Just avoiding that amount of fiddling is worth using an RS3. PPK the observation data twice - with different pole lengths - and there are the two ends of the rod with millisecond level tracking.
You can collect tilted positions when using the receiver in the Emlid Flow mobile app, but you won’t be able to control the unit installed on the drone. Reach RS3 can stream tilted coordinates in the NMEA format in real time but not store them in the Position log.
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Ah, interesting, so no tilt-PPKin Emlid Studio?
What a shame, thanks for explaining this, it seemed a given to me! How good that you are clarifying this!
I’m guessing it is because RINEX does not have a dedicated log entry for tilt?
But could you extend the RINEX logs and just append that tilt info?
Otherwise I would have to record NMEA, okay, somehow possible, I guess.
Shelving that approach for now…
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IMU calculations always apply to real-time positions; I don’t know any field-ready solutions that have tilt capabilities implemented into the PPK workflow.
No, there’s no option for that; RINEX contains raw satellite data, while the IMU values are applied to calculated coordinates.
We have the custom ETC message that can be implemented by third-party software to leverage tilt in the Reach RS3. However, this is also about RTK, not PPK.
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