SparkFun Forums

[Kcoolz]

HI,

We are working on a rover and wanted to know if it would be possible to make a board to make it easier to mount and have less wires. I'm new to this and not sure how the a la carte design works. All we need is an ESP32 with 2 RTK2.

Here is a screenshot of how our wiring looks between them. If someone is able to guide me in the right direction that would be great!

[sparky]

It's not possible on ALC at the moment because we've set the limit of one ZED per design. But that's because I assumed no one would ever want two ZEDs on a single board. Silly assumption on my part!

What are you building? It looks like one ZED is providing the correction data to the 2nd ZED. That makes sense for a moving baseline application but I've only seen those needed in aerospace applications.

If I were prototyping two ZEDs, I would use Qwiic and daisy chain them on any of our ESP32 boards that has a Qwiic connector. You'd need to change the I2C address of one of the modules using u-center (via USB) or over I2C but it works fine.

Once I understand your application a bit more we can easily configure the ALC block to allow for multiple on one board.

[Kcoolz]

Yeah we are creating a autonomous rover which we use a moving baseline to calculate yaw. Since our base is metal we it made more sense to use 2 GPS's without any compasses.

The ESP is getting corrections from our stationary base, feeding it to the first ZED. And then that ZED is feeding its moving corrections to the other one.

We were mostly interested in ALC just to combine them into 1 board which would reduce wires needed and it would have a smaller form factor.

[sparky]

Ah, that makes more sense. What is the ESP sending via UART2 to the ZED1? That's customarily RTCM (but can be anything really) and not what I would expect coming from an ESP.

[Kcoolz]

Yeah the ESP is sending RTCM3 messages through UART2.