The bad news is MicroSurvey has dropped support for RS3 Tilt / IMU in both FieldGenius Android and Windows versions.
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hmmm? Says page created 1 year ago…but updated 13 days ago. What the hell? Did they just now DROP IT out of nowhere? Is Microsurvey having issues with it and just giving up on it? Does Emlid have to pay them to support it? Is Microsurvey taking their ball and going home? ???
Setup Guides for EMLID and FieldGenius for Windows - MicroSurvey
Setup Guides for EMLID and FieldGenius for Android - MicroSurvey
FieldGenius for Android GNSS Supported Devices - MicroSurvey
|Emlid|Reach RS3 (NMEA)||Setup Guides
Tilt not supported|2.5|
Yet their Supported Hardware page states it does???
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A recent decision, they tried hard and still want to, but my understanding is at this stage it would need a rethink on the Emlid side to re-implement a robust command system similar to other receivers across the industry that FieldGenius supports.
That’s what existed originally with the RS3 and it worked fine up until the unexpected firmware change to only providing tilt externally to 3rd party via listen only NMEA stream (ETC message). That broke the FGA driver and was behind the FGA tilt issues & driver updates some months ago.
Apologies to Emlid if I have this wrong, in which case an update would be appreciated and hopefully an indication that Emlid will do what’s needed here.
Otherwise for me personally it’s a game changer.
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This is unexepected news for us as well.
This is not true. The RS3 has shipped with ETC message and that is what FGA has itegrated with originally. It was fully functional and we did not break this integration from our side.
At the request of other app developers, that didn’t want to or couldn’t implement ETC support, we have later also introduced a much more basic method of integration, where the RS3 is compensating the position in NMEA. The issue with this method is that there is no official support in NMEA for tilt compensation statuses like “move the receiver” message that you see in Emlid Flow. This method also requires configuring the antenna height through Emlid Flow, as we need this value to be able to calculate a tilt compensated NMEA. Overall it’s really cumbersome to use and it’s hard for the user to understand if tilt is engaged at all, but it allowed us to bring tilt compensated position into legacy systems and software, where there was no hope to update them to properly ingest IMU information.
FGA then, without consulting with us switched to this method, which gives a worse user experience as you might have experienced in one of their recent versions and after that we saw the news that the support has been completely removed. If they just kept the original version, everything would have continued to function without issues.
Just to reiterate. The original integration method, that supports full IMU orientation parameters and all tilt status information is still there. It is easy to check this by testing with an older FGA version with proper integration done.
It’s beyond my understanding why they have decided to change the integration method to a much more basic one and then drop support completely for a critical function in one of their most used receivers. We will do our best to try to convince them to revert these changes, but the final decision is in their hands.
We have always tried to be as open as possible to other app developers and ensure that our products are easy to integrate to give our customers the freedom to choose the app that best serves their needs.
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Thanks for the quick response Igor.
From the two very different views I’m hearing it appears the misunderstandings from last year have continued. Back in April I posted this RS3 tilt compensation work with external software - #14 by Wombo with a suggestion to try and establish regular technical engagement with MicroSurvey. It would seem this is now needed more than ever.
I’m getting the feeling it could be as simple as confusion in that they may believe they’ve been instructed to use the later basic method. For example, hence needing command capability to…propagate the antenna height which was a point mentioned.
Over to you, thanks.
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Emlid should really hit the survey software side HARD AND FAST. (toooo slow currently with its current manpower) Replicate EVERYTHING FieldGenius does (minus the Total Station features of course) or what other professional GNSS survey software has also… i.e. SurPad, SurPRO, Survey Master, Nuwa etc.
The edge Emlid has…is its ecosystem, value and popularity. Take advantage of that with a full featured complete survey software solution.
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I received a email from Microsurvey reporting they are in talks with Emlid regarding RS3 tilt.
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