Over the holidays I put together some parts I had been collecting to try and make a Ntrip Base Station for my Trimble and F9P rovers. I will share some stuff I learned.
When you go to esprtk homepage they have alot of instructions & you can get downloads etc, read through and use the tutorials for each step of your way, they help. Download firmware and serial utility, you need to learn how to use the serial utility to see what’s happening! That’s important
First thing, you need to wire a button to your esp board to put it into web config so you can get into it and change settings. Doesn’t matter how many buttons your board has on it, all the boards I had needed a button added to put it into web configure.
So to start you need to put the register file on the board, then follow the tutorial and with some button pushes you will be ready to upload it’s firmware. Then upload firmware. Once firmware is uploaded you can get into the web configure part, button pushes will depend on board, then have a tablet or phone etc that you can log onto the esp hotspot and go to the 192.168.4.1 that they talk about in tutorial, setup your login and now you are talking to your esprtk board!
You can change settings etc but I found that until you activate your board you won’t be able to talk to your gps, so follow tutorial and send esp the activate info and they will respond in about 12 hrs. Once you activate you will be able to get gps in and out of your setup to a caster.
If you are doing Ntrip caster follow those tutorials, pretty straightforward, need to set your action planning to your baud rate, and under action planning whether or not your gps is coming in on uart1 or 2, I found uart2 usually worked better but that may depend on board. set your internet to how you are going to send to caster, set your caster log in etc and set the rtcm inject for 1008, those are all along side as options.
Things I found at this point
-wifi settings to log onto your AP don’t seem to like passcodes longer than 8 characters, my home SSID had a 10 character and it wouldn’t connect, also my house has a mesh network and it kept saying found 2 identical SSid and would just stop trying to connect?
- if you are going to connect via internet it has dropdowns for enc28j60, w5500,w5100 adapters but it will not work with any kind of lan8710 adapters, I found this out because I setup a Olimex Esp32-POE-Iso and this uses a 8710 adapter and won’t work, apparently 8710 don’t use SPI, that’s over my head but many will know what that means
- there are pics on esprtk of how to connect ethernet adapters to your board and that was pretty straightforward
-on the web configure it shows a ublox gps section and that you can setup your f9p through it, just ignore that and setup your f9p with ucenter, I only have uart2 coming from f9p nothing going back. - the only thing I looked at was the gnss page to make sure I had gps coming into the esp, both these pages don’t stay connected when you are steaming data to caster, they are just for looking at info
- on ntrip caster section, I just setup the basic top part, if I tried the bottom custom stuff the caster would kick me off, must be too much info or something
- I am only sending rtcm data from the F9P via uart 2 at 57600, it’s important that under action planning you have the uart baud rate set to same as your gps output. Also need to map which uart your gps is coming into board. A note here, I could not get gps to send from uart1 on the f9p on tx1 pins. I had to use RX2, and this is important as RX2 actually is the pin that sends the info out of f9p, so I have rx2 on F9P connected to uart2 in on esp board.
- also important is that you jumper a wire on the f9p from 3.3volt out to ioref pin to set the voltage on that rx2 pin to 3.3 volts, apparently that’s important to not send 5volts to esp board.
- I only have 2 wires from f9p to esp, rx2 and ground, then the jumper for 3.3v to ioref on f9p
- I tried to use emlid caster as they have a new free one but you can’t see what info is going up there etc from their side so I switched to rtk2go, you can check your mount point and see what streams you have going up and if it’s live etc, that seems good. I haven’t connected to a Trimble to see if the 1008 inject is working but hope that works as this was whole point
- Couple other comments I have heard along the way is to make sure you have a solid power supply for this whole setup as that can affect the f9p or esp as they startup
This is very long but wanted to put a list of things I learned and hopefully that helps other, if you have questions I can try to help
Curt