Hello from a German in Australia

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Good evening.
I’m Angelo, I moved to Australia about 5 years ago and with no experience I got into cattle farming. Currently, I’m managing a stud of approximately 120 Speckle Park Cattle and I started getting into the GPS game about a year ago.

I’m using a single antenna setup (ardusimple) with a base station and rover, in combination with a 12" Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro and both, a Massey Ferguson 6265 and a Deutz-Fahr K420.

As my farming experience was pretty close to none, I started out building a foam marking system myself to see where I had spread fertiliser or where I had sprayed for weeds. Soon I thought it would be much easier to use a GPS.

There are now, however, a few questions.

  1. When I connect to my base station, the Ubloxsoftware recognises the module immediately. I use the same ardusimple modules for both, rover and base. However, when I connect to my rover, it can take up to 10 or 20 reconnections of the module to be recognised by the software. The Ublox software as well as AGOpenGPS tells me a lot of times that it couldn’t connect to the module.
    I do use a hub to connect from USB-B to USB-C and I am considering changing the module.

  2. When I’m out in the paddock, the accuracy is being compromised by the roll/tilt by the tractor. I understand that the best module to compensate for that is a BNO085. That isn’t available anywhere atm. Any suggestions of using another module?

  3. What are the advantages of using a dual GPS setup? Obviously, I’ll have to buy another module but are there modules that can take signals from two different antennas or will I have to have two modules?

  4. Last but not least, where would I find the best information about auto steer?

Regards
Angelo

1 Like
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I use the CMPS14 module, which I understand contains the BNO085, it works for me.
It can still be found at a couple of online retailers, one in France and one in Japan.
I got mine from Robotgear here in Oz but alas they are out of stock.
As for autosteer, just go to the Getting Started tab in the top right of the screen and have a read. If I can make it work, anyone can.

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I’m using the Adafruit board, but I have a spare chinese BNO085 board I was going to use for a second installation I haven’t got around to. Happy to pop it in the post if you like. I even have a mostly populated V2 steer board, plus a couple of pcb’s.

I find the IMU helps even though my paddocks are flat and I can get away without it.

I was having comm port issues recently that seemed to coincide with with a windows update, which ended up being a power issue (had to cyle the tablet to get it back). Needed power to the steer board before plugging the tablet in.