Adafruit Ultimate GPS on BlueROV

I am trying to add an adafruit ultimate GPS onto the blueROV by connecting to Pixhawk. I notice that this GPS is not officially supported. Is there a reason for this? And any tips on getting it to work?

Hi @cmarq,

If it’s not on the ArduPilot supported list then it presumably isn’t yet known to work well with ArduPilot firmwares and devices. In 2020 someone confirmed they could connect to it, so it’s possible it could work if the serial port is correctly set to use the NMEA data the GPS apparently outputs. If you test it and it works well you could submit a pull request to that documentation to include a link to it.

That said, standard GPS does not work under water, so (unless you are planning to use your BlueROV2 as only a surface vessel) it will end up with no data while under water, and corrupted data from when the vehicle dives beneath the surface or returns to the surface. There’s some additional discussion on that in this thread :slight_smile:

Hi Eliot,

I tried to connect to it and set the message type to NMEA with a baudrate of 9600. I also set it to 5Hz then made sure my GPS was sending updates at 5 Hz at 9600. Are there any settings that I should check that could be the culprit?

I raised this with the software team and the suggestions were to make sure

  • GPS_TYPE = NMEA (5)
  • SERIAL3_BAUD = 9600
  • SERIAL3_PROTOCOL = GPS (5)
  • EK3_SRC1_POSXY = GPS (3)