Piksi or how to be exact with low costs

So many of you probably know that there are some pretty amazing social crowdfunding projects hosted on kickstarter, startnext or indiegogo and we also started one campaign that was unfortunately not this succesfull in bringing a GIS E-Learning platform to the people. But it seems like there is one little campaign called Piksi that will be not only succesfull but might change the quality of our fieldwork in the future.


The Piksi is developed by the Swift Navigation Inc. and had the goal to reach 14.000$. But at the moment they are well beyond this with an overall of 115.000$. But what is it, hiding behind the name Piksi. The Piksi is a small GPS device which shall offer high precision GPS for a low price. If you have ever dealed with differential GPS systems to obatin sub-decimeter precision you now that it can cost more than one grand to get those devices and software infrastructure behind it. They are able to do so by analyzing the carrier and code phase of a GPS signal and using a second receiver and a open-source post-processing software to minimize the ionospheric error:


The whole package will cost 900$ in the end but is available for funders for 500$. You will get:

  • Centimeter level positioning (RTK)
  • Fast (50 Hz) position/velocity/time updates
  • Open source software and board design
  • Low power consumption : 500mW / 100mA typical
  • Small form factor : 53 x 53 mm
  • Low cost : $900 for a complete RTK system
  • post processing software Peregrine
  • Piksi firmware– customizable as it is open source

So if you want to enhance your:

  • UAVs
  • Amateur rocketry
  • Autonomous cars
  • Construction measurements
  • Surveying techniques
  • Heading and attitude determination
  • GPS education at the university
  • Geo-reference your aerial photography

Visit their campaign on kickstarter and support them:

Piksi, crowdfunding, GPS
Piksi in the non-rugged version

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments