semuadmin
commented
1 year ago Hi @AgileEngineeringLLC,
This is not the first time I’ve had a request for such a feature, but unfortunately there is no trivial solution here. To the best of my knowledge, even u-blox’s own u-center tool does not support this facility.
PyGPSClient does already partially support this requirement via its User-Defined Preset facility, which allows users to store their own sequences of UBX queries or commands in a ubxpresets file and send these to any number of compatible devices via a single mouse-click. However, this does require a certain amount of ‘hand-cranking’ to set up the presets in the first place, which I appreciate is not ideal.
Short of interacting with the GNSS device at the hardware level (i.e., interrogating & programming the MCU and/or EEPROM, which is beyond the scope of a UBX protocol parser), the only way of reproducing the current configuration of a u-blox GNSS device via the UBX protocol is to poll every possible configuration parameter using a series of CFG- GET queries, and then “replay” these as a series of CFG- SET commands.
For Generation 9+ devices such as the NEO-M9N, ZED-F9P, etc., legacy CFG- messages are deprecated in favour of the newer CFG-VALGET, CFG-VALSET and CFG-VALDEL message types. You can only poll up to 64 parameters in a single CFG-VALGET message. Given there are over 1,200 possible configuration parameters in the latest configuration database (not all are applicable to all devices*), a complete configuration dump would involve around 20 individual queries.
Since the UBX protocol does not support explicit synchronous message acknowledgement, there is no absolute guarantee that each CFG poll would receive a timely asynchronous response, especially if the device is already processing high navigation message rates. So you may have to 'retry' some of the polls to ensure you have a complete set of parameters to replay.
But this is not beyond the realms of possibility and I'm happy to put it on the feature backlog for further investigation, but it'll probably be a while before I get to it.
In the short term, I recommend you take a look at PyGPSClient's User-Defined Presets facility and the example ubxpresets file to see if it can meet at least some of your needs. If you need any assistance in configuring the ubxpresets file, get back to me.
Purely out of interest, are you able to give me a flavour of the sort of configuration(s) you would be looking to apply to multiple u-blox devices? In my experience, most working configurations typically involve changes to no more than 20 default settings, so performing a complete dump of all 1,200 parameters may be overkill.
AgileEngineeringLLC
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. no A clear and concise description of what the problem is e.g. I'd like to be able to do this [...] I'd like to be able to save the configuration to a file, and then be able to load that configuration back later (or to a second device)
Describe the solution you'd like I'd use the current menus to configure the device (I use F9Ps), and then I'd like to store that configuration to a file. This would allow me to quickly configure that same device or another device to my saved configuration. Thx!
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Would you be willing to contribute a test device?
If the request relates to a specific u-blox device that is not currently supported, would you be willing to contribute a device to the project for testing purposes?
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