So we’ve recently stepped up our game from an oldschool transit to a pair of RS3’s. We originally purchased them for grade control but I have been trying to expand that to surveying and making a game plan before the iron gets in the field
I guess my question here is, I’ve just been using the Emlid flow app, marking points and naming them with the elevations for quick reference which works good enough if I’m just out looking at things myself, but when I want to pass this information on to another guy a bunch of random elevations on a blank page aren’t exactly useful. There must be a better app to use or maybe a way to use the phones location on the Emlid app so the other guys can reference their location on the map without them having to drag along the rover all day?
I have tried to export to Avenza maps but I can’t seem to get that to work. Maybe this is just something I need to do in a completely different app?
Flow doesn’t use the phone’s gps, so you need to use another app if you want to see your location relative to the saved points. It is pretty simple. Just export your points to .kml and import them into any mapping type app that does use the phone’s position. There are tons of them.
Note that the .kml file will not show the elevation of points. If you want that info available in the other app, then you need to copy the elevation into the description field before export out of Flow.
Thanks, any hint as to which app is going to work? Like I said I’ve tried Avenza which won’t allow me to upload the kml that the Emlid flow app is saving, and tried a couple other random map apps to no avail.
Some of the threads I’ve dug up searching the subject have either turned up programs that are no longer available, not iOS compatible or just way too fancy and expensive for what I’m doing!
Not dumb… just an OVERTHINKER like the rest of us. 1st thing that came to mind, but wasn’t sure if it fit what you needed… quick suggestion… but like @dpitman mentioned… LOTS of options out there.
GE works great for visualization of your points. But I thought you wanted to see where you are in relation to the points via a phone’s gps? I don’t think GE has that functionality although I could be wrong.
The pins show up with the elevation numbers and with location services on it shows you where you’re at on the map.
Only thing better would be something I could overlay a current aerial photo of the site rather than the 5 year old picture of the site, but maybe that’s getting a little too fancy
MicroSurvey FieldGenius Android allows to also assign different basmaps and you can toggle between your phones internal GPS or use your GNSS receiver. (Windows version can too if using Windows Tablet with GPS etc)
Probably other survey apps do this too. I.e. SurPad, SurPro, SurvX etc etc etc. Search here.
I’ll check into it. If anything GE will do what I want.
I’ll check into uploading the aerial on the app, that’s a requirement for sure, only being able to do it on desktop is no help. I want something I can set up on the old timers phones and they can go out and do their thing without harassing me all day! Haha
Any ideas on what a guy can use for creating landxml files that isn’t $500/month? Everything I search comes back to using civil3d
I can work without it but it would sure make my life a lot easier if I could use the stakeout feature to mark the cut/fill for the guys that are bulking in material with the scraper. Right now I’m just taking a shot at either end and manually figuring out the elevations inbetween for the slope I desire
There are a couple of plugins in QGIS which the community here has helped to work out how to get the right sized LandXML file.
The workflow is: Create a vector contour file → TIN Mesh Creation Plugin to create a TIN Mesh → Convert Meshes to LandXML plugin to create the LandXML file.
The one wrinkle is that if there are artefacts in the contour file - which there often are from drone imagery, things like little short or squiggly contour segments, then your LandXML will be huge. So it pays to pre-process the contour layer with the Vector->Geometry Tools->Simplify tool, prior to using the mesh creator.
If you don’t do this already already, I recommend that you always establish (and shoot with the RS3) a handful of fixed ground control points (I just use #4 or #5 capped rebar). Most of my work is set in local coordinates (Global CS in Emlid Flow_Survey) and the Localization routine works well to go back and shoot more points as needed. I also hand these local coordinates over to the earthwork contractor for them to set up their machine control. They use Trimble RTK equipment so they simply need to “resection” on my points. They like to have six or more control points to resection on and sometimes my initial points might be where they’ll get obliterated. So, once we figure out where control points will be safe, I go back out, do a Localization on the control points, and set a few more where needed.
Thanks this is all new to me, just playing around trying to figure out what I’m doing
I have figured out how to do the base offset or whatever it’s called in the Emlid app. That works pretty slick for going back out to reshoot. I was surprised how far off the coordinates were from day to day!
I played around a bit with qgis but never really got anywhere with it. I need to sit down and watch a few YouTube videos and figure it out. I took what I thought was a pretty extensive amount of shots with the rs3 and didn’t really get it to put anything out other than a bunch of garbage that vaguely resembles the landscape
I played with pix4d on trial for a little bit just to see what I can accomplish on a somewhat easier to navigate platform. Definitely have a lot more to learn on photogrammetry, and probably need to be using a better drone
