Trimble Buys Belgian Company For Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Trimble of California just recently took over the Belgian company Gatewing which specializes in super light unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

Trimble will be using these UAVs to create aerial imagery such as orthophotos and Digital Surface Models (DSMs). One of the vehicles Gatewing makes is X100 which a sub 5 lbs plane with GPS, gyro system, radio communications module, a 10MP camera, and of course a power source. What X100 will do after entering flight information is to map the terrain with parallel flight paths and overlapping photos.

Anders Rhodin, director of Trimble’s Survey Business said this on this recent acquisition:

“The combination of UAVs and low-altitude photogrammetry as an image collection platform opens up new opportunities for surveyors to use aerial imagery for the rapid acquisition of high-density geospatial data.”

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Sailing Gps

This is a GPS device made just for sailing and you can pick one up online for $400.
How this is different than GPS chartplotters is that it is very difficult to correctly estimate time of arrival on those. What this GPS does is that it accounts for the tacking that sailboats and also give you the optimal tacking angles and your Tacking Time to Destination (TTD). It does this by displaying how long it will take to reach each tack, and the optimal tacks to arrive earliest.

Another handy feature of this Sailing GPS is the ability to talk to Google Maps via bluetooth which beats entering lat long manually. When you’re done you can hook up to a computer and see your vessel’s speed stats, and wind speeds.

The Sailing GPS is based on a new patent called “Navigational Planning and Display Method for the Sailor’s Dilemma When Heading Upwind” which was filed 6 years ago but just recently granted.

Asus Transformer Prime Users To Get A Free Gps Dongle

Asus Transformer Prime users haven’t had the best GPS experience yet. The company admitted it was their fault that the device could not get a solid GPS satellite fix. So their current fix for the time being is to offer each and every Transformer Prime user a free GPS dongle.

The reason they provided was that the external metal body of the tablet interfered with the GPS signals. So now the best they can do is to send an external GPS receiver:

It will look similar to the hinge from the dock. Where it will be a flush fit on the bottom of the unit if held in landscape matching the color of your Prime chassis.

The external GPS dongle will be ready by about mid-April but we’re not clear on the claim process yet.

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