I have been flying with the new Emlid M2 unit for the last 130 missions. Performances have been up and down. At the moment i would say stay away from the unit and buy something else if you want a stable and robust RTK GPS unit.
Latest firmware they released is basicly not working, units jumps from single to float to fixed in a continue dance that makes the unit pratically unflyable.
On top of that Emlid doesn’t allow users to go back to a previous and better working firmware. Once you update it is impossible to go back to a previous release, making the unit, in case of faulty firmware, virtually unusable.
In my case, i updated the unit last thursday to the latest stable 2.22.2 version and from that moment i just couldn’t fly the Uav anymore. Since i was out doing some work, i had to drive back to the office (600 miles round trip) to get another unit we had not updated and put it on the Uav to keep working, since downgrading is impossible.
All in all i had a much much better experience using the latest Sirius from Drotek.
To all the people looking at the Emlid M2 my advice is to wait at least for a new working stable version and for the possibility of a downgrade of the firmware itself to avoid bad situations in future.
Another issue i have had, but that is peculiar to my installation, is that for me connecting to the Emlid wifi has been very hard. The unit comes up and looks for known networks and if it finds one connects to it. In my installation i have the router of the Uav powering up at the same time as the Emlid unit, but the router is somehow slower in booting, so the Emlid unit doesn’t see a known network on boot and doesn’t connect to it and turns itsel in access point mode. This behaviour can’t be changed, can’t make the unit look for known networks any longer and can’t disable access point mode. My workaround has been to turn on Emlid unit 40-50 seconds after i turn on my uav (added a switch to the emlid power cable). I asked Emlid to have some more options for wifi, either make looking for known network time longer or disable access point mode. At the moment neither of these options are available.
In the old versions of firmware Emlid gave access to root login, wich would have helped in solve my wifi connection problems (i would have introduced a delay somewhere), on latest firmware they do not give root passwords anymore.
Emlid usually not very fast in answering to people requests or problems.
Just a quick update. We are basicly grounded on one of our units since last thursday when Emlid released a broken firmware. At the moment Emlid didn’t release a fix nor gave us the chance to go back to a previous working firmware.
Keep these reaction times in mind if you plan on buying an M2 from Emlid or an RS2 base station. As far as i understand people with RS2 are having same problems too (RS2 is a few thousands dollars base units).
One week down and counting…
Update for interested people. More and more people grounded since last firmware release. If you have an emlid reach do not update to latest version. Latest firmware is broken since last thursday and emlid didn’t react yet nor pubblished an unlocked version of previous firmware. Still grounded…
At the field this morning, gps signal all over the place, second uav unflyable, loosing days of work because emlid doesn’t allow to roll back to a functioning firmware!!!
Unbelievable!!!
Put 2 sirius from drotek on the machines and we are back to work. Rock solid.
M2 at the moment will go in the trash bin, will see if reuse them when/if emlid will decide to help their customers.
Thank you for reporting this here, we are working on reproducing the issue. I completely agree that a situation when your drone is grounded because of our equipment is unacceptable and we are doing our best to solve this as soon as possible. If you could send us the log files and system report from the problematic unit this would help speed up our investigation.
As a temporary solution, I’ve offered a remote debug session with our engineers, which we suggested last Sunday.
We are not yet ready to offer a reliable firmware rollback mechanism and this is definitely not something that we want to rush now, but your case is a strong vote that this is something that we should prioritize and I already mentioned that in our conversation on Emlid forum. We are fully committed to solving the issue that you experiencing and our team is working tirelessly on that.
If anyone experiences a similar issue with Reach M2 and the latest ReachView please contact us at support@emlid.com
Take a look at your forum and you’ll see plenty of people with similar problems.
In a situation like this you don’t need to offer a rollback mechanism, just put on your forum a link to a previous firmware without the update check, it would take 1 hour to do, a fully featured rollback mechanism can come later, If you do it people can flash and keep working while you reproduce the fault.
We have been in this situation for 1 week and you simply refuse to release a previous firmware without the authomatic update trap.
As i said before i will be more than happy to send a log for debugging if you release a 2.22.1 without update trap.
Just to make things clear, reverting back to an older firmware is easy and can be done in 5 min with emlid flash utility, problem is that a new firmware once flashed goes online and looks for an update, if it finds it than you can’t go any further and are forced to update. So all we need is a 2.22.1 firmware that lets you pass the forced update step.
One last thing, if you release a 2.22.1 you could have a quick field comparison that could help a great deal in isolating the prob
As said before my advice from the field and after 200 flights, STAY AWAY FROM EMLID at the moment.
A small update on our investigation. We couldn’t confirm any issue with RTK performance at v2.22.2 and we have no other reports about this issue by this time. To learn more, check Tatiana’s message on Emlid forum.
We are open to continuing investigation, but we’ll need your logs and system reports to reproduce your setup.
Useless test. 5 minutes on a car doesn’t mean anything. Is a fact that 2.22.2 does not work at field. I am glad it works in your offices.
I am surprised it took you more than a week to drive the unit around 5 min on a car and declare it is ok.
It is a fact that reach M2 does not work in the same place where sirius drotek works all day without a glitch.
As said before you will have my logs when you give me 2.22.1
For people reading this interested in rtk, please consider sirius drotek and stay away from emlid. Reach just does not work on latest firmware.
p.s. Really 5 minutes on top of a car to declare it works??? These are all the tests in more than a week?? Come on get out of this hobbyist mentality and get real.
Almost crashed the big drone, after some use the reach M2 starts to throw strange stuff out of the serial and all sats go to zero.
Reach M2 on latest firmware is really dangerous to use and should be grounded umtil emlid conducts some decent testing and find out what got broken on firmware 2.22.2 and later.
We understand the situation you are experiencing, and the feeling of being trapped in a catch 22.
We consider the help from @dmitriyershov as being an honest effort to resolve this very particular configuration and please show some respect as he is probably the only one who can resolve it. Good Luck and keep a positive attitude
Really hard to stay calm when you are loosing days of work and until the update everything was ok. He has no respect from me whatsoever, we have been grounded for days.
M2 is not a few bucks gps so one expects it to work and is not a comunity project, we paied premium and expect premium.
What really really annoys me is the fact that we can’t revert back to a perfect 2.22.1
I would consider >5k$ a premium in GNSS business. Emlid Reach is built with lowish profit margin, BOM cost for one unit must be around 200$.They are making great products in their price range.
Get a Leica or Trimble for professional work, and then you will have premium support available. Those units cost around 5-15k$.
650 usd for the rover unit including the antenna is premium for uav use in my book, expecially now with l1/l2 low cost f9 chip. Maybe you were right few years ago when multi frequency receivers where very very expensive.
I will send them no problem as soon as they give me back 2.22.1 to work with. I will surely help them find out the bug as long as they help me too.
It is not childish by any means iam just trying to have back a firmware that was working perfect.
Try staying 2 weeks on a gigantic photovoltaic plant at shooting serials, flying at 5 meters from the panels with a faulty gps going all over the place after a firmware update and see if you don’t get very very frustrated.
We were shooting about 4000 serials a day until new firmware than we dropped to 500-600 with 1 good flight every 10. This is the damage they made to us, and refuse to let us go back to 2.22.1. We have been in this situation since 10 days ago.
Now who is more childish? Me trying to have a firmware that has been working great or them refusing to doubt their latest firmware and keep us in this situation?
