The Spyder Tech Story

 The idea was conceived from the frustration of my own bait boat GPS inaccuracies.
Having found a feeding spot in a hole in a dense weed bed the size of a dustbin lid. My casting skills are not accurate enough to hit a spot 90 metres out and 400mm across. Even if I could cast onto the spot, the trajectory would certainly embed my lead and rig in the weed. The only option available was to deploy the bait boat to do the job for me.
To my despair the M8N GPS navigation was not up to scratch, sometimes being up to 1m off the spot and dropping the baited hook directly into the weed. Something needed to be done!

Earlier in the year I had heard about RTK but knew absolutely nothing about it or how it worked. I looked up kinematics and found algebra!
During October 2022 I began researching RTK, how and where it was used and the history behind it.

In the real world away from hobby spec machines, RTK is used in construction, agriculture and surveying but also comes with an expensive price tag to boot!

Further research found that RTK had been used for a few years in the hobbyist UAV community to good effect. Now to find an off the shelf product that would plug and play directly into the autopilot. The UAV market place was set up for everything imaginable that could fly or cut grass but unfortunately nothing for bait boats. 

Adamant to find something that could be adapted in some way I persevered researching any avenue possible but the results were unsatisfactory.
UAV RTK setups use Windows based PC's or laptops for configuration and operation, thanks to uBlox and Ardupilot. This was a disaster and no good for my use case as I use an Android tablet to operate the boats autopilot via Carp Pilot Pro and not wanting to have to take a laptop to the lake with me as well as the mountain of fishing gear, I began to look for an alternative.

The alternative came in the form of needing to build a bespoke system myself. In order to achieve what was required, this meant writing extensive code. Writing code is not my forte so I reached out to a software developer for some much needed help. 

Feeling completely helpless whilst the coding wizards beavered away, the impatience was getting the better of me.
After much toing and froing the wizards delivered a solution. 

Now the first draughts of code were complete, a crash course in PCB design was required.
This ended up being a trial and error exercise but a few revisions later, two PCBs with attributes specifically designed for bait boats emerged.

A few small fine tuning tweaks to the code and adjustments to the PCB’s were needed but the final results were absolutely amazing, I couldn't have been happier!

Kinexion is the boat module that sends the boats gps position to a base station in the form of NMEA GGA messages. It also receives RTCM correction messages from the base station.
Kinexion is made up from a uBlox F9P GPS and has the following connectivity methods: Cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and LORA radio.

Kast is a base station module that receives NMEA GGA messages confirming the boats position and sends RTCM messages to the boat.
Kast is made up from a uBlox F9P GPS and has the following connectivity methods: Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Lora radio. 

When both modules are working together Real Time Kinematics status is achieved (RTK).

Kast and Kinexion together form Navis RTK. Both these modules are configurable via their own web interfaces using any device with WiFi. As we use an Android tablet to run the Carp Pilot Pro app we have no requirement for laptops at the lake. More importantly the uBlox F9P GPS modules are also able to be programmed via the web interface from an android tablet!

Navis RTK has been designed around the use of an ArduRover flight controller and Carp Pilot Pro to provide cm accuracy never to be found in UK bait boats before and not a laptop in sight.