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H520E RTK From the Box Up

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The other threads seemed to be going a slightly different direction so I decided to start this new thread for practical experience on unboxing through troubleshooting, configuration and firmware updates. I will be using the E90X camera.

I finally got everything in from Vertigo and am starting configuration and testing today. First issue I have hit is that I have no control of the E90X. It starts correctly, centers and can even be calibrated, but the RC input is not doing anything. (UPDATED) Maybe it was just the act of a reflash, but going from E90X v1.0.74_A to v.1.0.75_A and we now have RC control of the camera. Interesting thing is that the updates according to the RC report a "newer" v1.0.65_A....

Also, what is the update protocol? The is no longer an UpdatePilot app and the software reports what is current and available but there is no action to take.

Next hiccup is that the ZIP file for the ODFM as on the downloads site seems to be corrupted and unable to be opened.
 
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Just flew its first map, a test of my house. Everything went very well except for the fact that I don't like its attitude in the turns. It seems to have devolved to a state that we got them away from when we were first doing the beta on the original H520 almost 5 years ago. It has a strange deceleration followed by yaw, then a short straight shot, another deceleration and a yaw before the throttle kicks in again. Very unsettling. Does anyone know of a setting that can modify this? Maybe related to the turnaround distance? The only way I know is in the advanced menu parameters and I'm not going there with this new bird. They really need to emulate the rotated strafe that DroneDeploy does. @Steve Carr @Rayray @terrence davidson

Processing on DroneDeploy now and will be back with some results.
 
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First map processed and I am pretty happy with what I see at first glance. The first nice surprise was to see that DroneDeploy recognized not only the E90, but that it was an E90X. The main values I wanted to see were the camera optimization variance and the RMSE of the Camera GPS Locations. These are both values that give the algorithm the most trouble in eliminating warping.

While a 0.03% variation from reference intrinsics in camera optimization is excellent I am more concerned with the separation of the principal point (spec'd center) to the CCD (calculated) center. This tells me that the E90X camera does not have a very good calibration or a profile that compensates well for the lack of calibration. Although we do have to remember that this is rolling versus global shutter and that the P4RTK is supposedly uniquely calibrated.


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...and here's a Phantom 4 RTK

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The more important value though is the RMSE of the camera GPS locations. These are without GCP's. Non-RTK is usually around 1m depending upon the conditions and quality of the satellites that day. Most RTK reports that I have seen have been right around a 10cm range. On this test the H520E RTK was better than the P4 RTK.

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P4RTK Samples
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Overall I am really happy with what I see and hope that it continues or even gets better as I get it tweaked. Another task I will take on is figuring out the PPK side. I see files getting populated all over the place but have no idea what to do with them yet. Has anyone seen ANY information on the PPK process?
 
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Very interesting. this is some of the info I been waiting for. how did you setup the first test? I would like to repeat it with a non rtk h520e and see if I get the same results as you on h520e flight behavior or if there be any variations from what you had. Also do you use the drone log book option on the st16e? If so do you have issues with uploading the log right from st16e? Was the rtk test based of internet connection to base station or on location non internet base station? Unrelated did you redo your faa 107 renewal training slash test to get night time operations starting Apirl 21st? I have downloaded the odfm file from yuneec and extracted it to on my laptop. I have not tried to apply it because the time stamp listed in the zip file as a much older date which indicates it the original release.
 
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Very interesting. this is some of the info I been waiting for. how did you setup the first test? I would like to repeat it with a non rtk h520e and see if I get the same results as you on h520e flight behavior or if there be any variations from what you had. Also do you use the drone log book option on the st16e? If so do you have issues with uploading the log right from st16e? Was the rtk test based of internet connection to base station or on location non internet base station? Unrelated did you redo your faa 107 renewal training slash test to get night time operations starting Apirl 21st? I have downloaded the odfm file from yuneec and extracted it to on my laptop. I have not tried to apply it because the time stamp listed in the zip file as a much older date which indicates it the original release.
The first test flight was just a standard Survey pattern with a 5ft turnaround distance. No images in turnarounds. I was flying pretty low at 60 ft with 75% overlaps so I had to manually turn the flight speed down to 7mph in order to get rid of the camera interval breach notification.

RTK was via NTRIP over a hotspot.

We have our own internal systems so I don't use Drone Logbook.

After some more digging into the software I think I figured out that the ZIP file for ODFM can only be loaded through the advanced settings menu but I am not even going to think about doing that until I get a full day of mapping in, lol.
 
If you got the h520e rtk from vertigo drones they should have loaded the most recent firmware onto it before they ship it out.
 
I did and they may have tried but didn't get them all. The odd thing is that whatever the "official" source feed is for DataPilot is reporting older firmware versions. What does your setup currently have?
 
I haven't gotten the washers (neoprene rubber, 1-1/4" x 3/8" x 1/8") in yet but they should be here Tuesday.
Thank you for all this very informative and indepth stuff about the H520E RTK inlcuding NTRIP, camera/survey quality and so on!
About the strange DataPilot missions' turnaround behaviour I can only say that my H520 also changed its habits after the January 2021 updates. The only way to get rid of slowed down and even loitering turns was to set turnaround distance to 0 and disabling "take images in turnaround".
BTW I noticed that since then my H520 did not take any photos on the inbound leg to the mission resume point after battery change...
AND: I noticed on your image in your initial post, that the battery cartons are labeled "Lithium Polymer Battery: H520E". Wasn't a special new feature of the H520E series that "Lithium Ion Batteries" were put into place. Actually a good thing to do, as this enables storage at fully charged levels with only minor voltage degradation.
You also have the orange charger that actually should be the Li-Ion version...
 
The only way to get rid of slowed down and even loitering turns was to set turnaround distance to 0 and disabling "take images in turnaround".
That was my thought as well. I use to always run 0 turnaround on my v1 H520 but this one was defaulted to 32ft (10m) so I dropped it to 5ft just to see what happened. I also turned off images in turns.

I noticed on your image in your initial post, that the battery cartons are labeled "Lithium Polymer Battery: H520E". Wasn't a special new feature of the H520E series that "Lithium Ion Batteries" were put into place.
We had some discussions on this site about that a little bit in the past and what I came to understand is that a Li-ion is a type of LiPo.
 
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We had some discussions on this site about that a little bit in the past and what I came to understand is that a Li-ion is a type of LiPo.
I had a talk about LiPo vs. Li-Ion with H520 product managers back in December 2019 and they said that the most important benefit of Li-Ion would be better long term storage behaviour when being fully charged. This way Li-Ions could be used with much more confidence and ease by first responders, who have to be "ready for take-off" any time.
The problem with LiPo batteries is that they loose voltage and get "chemically corrupted" when being stored at fully charged status over a longer time period e.g. above 10 days.

But I forgot to ask you one further question about your combination of H520E-RTK+E90X:
Did you already check the Exif-Data of the E90X jpegs? Are the GPS altitudes correct? Do they show AMSL or ellipsoid altitude?
(My H520-E90 showed AMSL for years and since the January 2021 OTA updates it changed to WGS84 ellipsoid).
 

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