Welcome Facet: A Complete, Field-Ready GNSS-RTK Surveyor
The RTK Facet joins the ranks of SparkFun's enclosed surveying tools at a fraction of the price of comparable products.
Hello and welcome to a most propitious Friday Product Post here at SparkFun Electronics! For the last year, we have been releasing a whole line of enclosed RTK Surveyors for highly accurate geospatial coordinates, and now we are happy to release the culmination of our efforts. Meet the SparkFun RTK Facet, a fully enclosed GNSS receiver for centimeter-level positioning!
One last bit of info before we get to the new products (this will be important for anyone who wants to pick up a Facet before the holidays): As a reminder, Monday, December 20th by 2:00 p.m. MST, is our last day to place orders and receive items in time for December 24th. Orders must be shipped using Overnight Shipping or Two Business Day shipping. More details on holiday shipping guidelines can be found on our 2021 Holiday Shipping Guide.
Facets are a surveyor's best friend!
The SparkFun RTK Facet is your one stop shop for high precision geolocation and surveying needs. For basic users, it’s incredibly easy to get up and running. For advanced users, the RTK Facet is a powerful and flexible tool. With just a few minutes of setup, the RTK Facet is one of the fastest ways to take centimeter grade measurements. By connecting your phone to the RTK Facet over Bluetooth®, your phone can act as the radio link to provide correction data as well as receive the NMEA output from the device. This is exactly how $10,000 surveying devices have been operating for the past decade - we just made it easier, smaller, and inexpensive.
Under the hood is an ESP32 WROOM connected to a ZED-F9P, as well as some peripheral hardware (LiPo fuel gauge, microSD, etc). Housed under the dome of the RTK Facet is a surveyor grade L1/L2 antenna, which is the same element found within our GNSS Multi-Band L1/L2 Surveying Antenna. The built in antenna has an ARP of 61.4mm from the base to the measuring point of the L1 antenna and an ARP of 57.4mm to the measuring point of the L2 antenna. The RTK Facet is programmed in Arduino and can be tailored by you to fit whatever your needs may be.
Sometimes you need to move a little air around. Whether for active cooling or ventilation, a tiny fan can make a big difference. However, a tiny fan also has tiny wires which can make it difficult to work with. We've remedied this issue with the Qwiic Blower Fan by mounting said fan to a board along with the mating flat-flex connector, a voltage booster and an ATtiny-based driver so you can power and control the fan over the Qwiic bus.
That's it for this week. As always, we can't wait to see what you make. Shoot us a tweet @sparkfun, or let us know on Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn. Please be safe out there, be kind to one another, and we'll see you next week with even more new products!
Wow Nate! Nice work on the Facet. It looks like a well polished product offering.
That would have been great to have on my AVC vehicle!