WATCH: Easy RTK setup on a Bad Elf Flex with Polaris RTK

Published by Aaron Nathan // April 13, 2024

Today we're going to set up a Bad Elf Flex.

So to do that we just need to turn it on, press and hold the power button until you see the lights come, do a little dance and then the device will start.

Now we've started our Bad Elf device and you can see the main menu here. You should go through and pair this with your mobile device. We've gone ahead and done that and we'll show you the rest of the configuration from the perspective of the phone.

Now we're going to open the Bad Elf Flex application. It's available on the iOS App Store. When you open the application it will automatically start searching for devices. You should pair this with your phone's bluetooth. We've already gone ahead and done that, but once that's done you'll see it automatically connects to our Bad Elf Flex unit.

Now we're going to show you how to connect to the Point One Polaris service. You simply click on the corrections mode and then you can select the Point One Navigation service. And then you allow this to use your GPS. Your output datum by default is going to be NAD83. If that's what you're surveying in, that's fine. You can go ahead and tap to confirm and then go ahead and hit connect. You'll see that the device will begin to connect to the Point One service.

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And as soon as I said that it went to RTK fixed. This is the highest degree of accuracy that you can have from GPS. And now you are ready to start surveying with your Bad Elf Flex device.

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Now we're going to show the MANUAL setup with the Bad Elf Flex device. So the first step is to go into the Bad Elf application, connect to your device. It'll take a second to find in bluetooth. Once it connects, you'll see that the device will show its position. And then we want to go into the correction mode menu. You'll select RTK via NTRIP and here you'll want to configure the network. The first step is to create a profile. So we'll go ahead and do that. We can name it whatever we want. In this case we'll call it just p1. The host will be Polaris.pointonenav.com. If you're in the EU that would be Polaris-EU.pointonenav.com and then the port will be 2101.

Now for the user and password we need to go to the Point One website. So we will go ahead and open that in Safari. Go ahead and now, create a device for the Bad Elf Flex. I'll just go ahead and name it badelf. Hit done. And then hit the add button. If I go into my Bad Elf device, I can see the credentials. Then go ahead and copy and paste your credentials from the website to the app. Under the mount point, you will see options here. You want to select the Polaris mount point and then the datum is going to be the ITRF 2014 datum. That's what the Polaris service is normally output in. Go ahead and hit save and you'll notice that it saves your profile.

And now you can go ahead and click this and you'll see that the network p1 that we just created is selected. Hit the connect button and then you will have the device start to make a connection and then instantly have the device now RTK fixed. If we go back and look at the Point One website, we can actually see that our device is showing up in the address that we are actually operating in and there's a green checkmark indicating that the connection is good.

Aaron is an entrepreneur and technical leader with over two decades of experience in robotics and software/hardware development. He has deep domain experience in sensor fusion, computer vision, navigation, and embedded systems, specifically in the context of robotic applications.
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