Reading Raw Data With Arduino (SimpleRTK2b)

Q&A forumCategory: QuestionsReading Raw Data With Arduino (SimpleRTK2b)
sungummy asked 1 year ago
Hi, I have a few simpleRTK boards and I want to read the UBX messages (specifically NavPVT) with an arduino. Eventually, I’ll have the data stored inn SD card but for now I am just trying to print to the serial monitor. I cannot get any accurate data to show up on the serial monitor and I am not sure what I could try doing now.
I have tried using the HW Serial port (Rx/Tx) on the arduino (since those are the pins the ardusimple uses) as well as using jumpers and to GPIO pins and using the SoftwareSerial library but I have had no luck. I’m not sure if I’m missing something with the baud rate or rate, but I have everything set to 9600 baud and 1 Hz packet rate.
thoxrider
replied 1 year ago

Hey Sungummy, I was wondering if you have succeeded in recieving the message using Arduino. If so, could you help me with the same, and possibly share the methodology you followed?

thanks!

sungummy
replied 1 year ago

I have not yet, but I will post here once I figure it out. Let me know if you figure it out first!

2 Answers
Ardusimple Staff answered 1 year ago
A few things to check:

  1. Unlike NMEA, UBX protocol is not human readable, if you send it to a terminal you will only see funny characters.
  2. Make sure you are stacking our board on top of Arduino UNO. If you are instead connecting wires pin to pin, check that you are enabling the Arduino rails by connecting IOREF to 3.3V.
  3. 9’600bps at 1Hz, if your antenna is placed outside with good sky view… might be too slow baudrate. ZED-F9P can see so many satellites that the default messages will very fast become very long.
sungummy
replied 1 year ago

Thank you for your quick reply! I will try these suggestions out. I had this same issue with NMEA and UBX, even when just printing the hex byte to the terminal. Maybe I’m doing something wrong there?

For your third point, could you elaborate on that a bit? the NavPVT message is ~100 bytes. At 1 Hz, how would that affect the serial communication?

Ardusimple
Staff replied 1 year ago

Hi sungummy,
If you only have UBX-NAV-PVT it should be ok. But by default all NMEA messages are enabled, this is why we mentioned it in our previous message.

sungummy
replied 1 year ago

I see. I changed the config to only have UBX-NAV-PVT enabled. I’m still not able to get the communication to work. Should it be as simple as stacking the board on the arduino and then reading from Serial ( i.e. Serial.read() )

Ardusimple
Staff replied 1 year ago

Yes. Maybe it’s good if you do one step back, revert to default configuration and start with NMEA protocol at 38’400bps, might be easier.

sungummy answered 1 year ago
Little late but turns out the fix for me was in the F9P config settings. I changed the messages being sent on the USB port on the chip, not on the UART1, which is what the Arduino reads from. In u-center, I enabled UBX-NAV-PVT from UBX-CFG-MSG on UART1 and then was able to read messages.

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