Hello to the community
I am working on a drone that does photography with a camera on a gimbal. What I want to do is , for each picture I take with the camera, log the position of the drone, and the attitude of the gimbal (pitch, roll, yaw compared to vertical initial position for example).
For this purpose, I am thinking about using the Reach M+ module with a GNSS Here 2 GPS antenna and a Hotshoe trigger event device. The hotshoe would tell the reach module when to write a log. The GPS antenna would feed the reach module with position information. And finally the attitude of the camera would be measured with the reach module IMU data (assuming that I put the module at the same place as the camera on the gimbal of course, so it moves with the camera).
The problem I have is that I am not 100% sure that reach module is able to do this: can anyone tell me if this is feasible and what would be the difficulties I could encounter?
I did not manage to find an example of log file that the reach module generates, if anyone has an example to show me that would be great!
Thank you all for your help.
Sebastien
Hello @sebastienp and welcome to the forum,
For this purpose, I am thinking about using the Reach M+ module with a GNSS Here 2 GPS antenna and a Hotshoe trigger event device. The hotshoe would tell the reach module when to write a log. The GPS antenna would feed the reach module with position information.
Yes, this is possible. Reach (M+) can connect to a camera shutter via hot shoe. The time of each photo is logged with a resolution of less than a microsecond and you receive coordinates of exact moments of each photo taken. You can read more about this here:
https://docs.emlid.com/reachm-plus/common/tutorials/ppk-introduction/
And finally the attitude of the camera would be measured with the reach module IMU data (assuming that I put the module at the same place as the camera on the gimbal of course, so it moves with the camera).
This might be a problem because IMU data extraction is not implemented on ReachView. However, there are solutions for this. You can read about them here:
I did not manage to find an example of log file that the reach module generates, if anyone has an example to show me that would be great!
https://docs.emlid.com/reach/common/reachview/logging/
https://docs.emlid.com/reach/common/reachview/position-output/#formats
Finally, you can find all of the documentation on Reach M+ here:
https://docs.emlid.com/reachm-plus/
I hope this information can help you out!