Nikon Communication Interface Manual

The Parani works really well simple to setup now controlling total station without the pc from phone!

Very interesting to me that the document has both the Trimble and Nikon logo. I wish they would release a similar document for the S6, but Trimble has always been known for being very proprietary. This is probably leftover from the days when Nikon was a separate company.

John Hamilton, post: 385296, member: 640 wrote: Very interesting to me that the document has both the Trimble and Nikon logo. I wish they would release a similar document for the S6, but Trimble has always been known for being very proprietary. This is probably leftover from the days when Nikon was a separate company.

It may be possible to listen in on the Bluetooth / COM and decode the results.
I decoded most of the useful strings before i got the official document.

I thought about that before, but I assumed that since Carlson and other third party DC makers don't support the Trimble gear that it must not be possible to reverse-engineer the interface, or at least very difficult.

The word I got from a developer was that Trimble began either encrypting its data stream or otherwise locking out non-Trimble devices with the advent of the S6. I don't imagine they've stopped that practice.

That is what I figured, otherwise someone would have done it. As I mentioned many times here, I have been using Trimble since 1986, and have no complaints about quality, etc, and have no plans or desire to change, but this is the one thing I hate about them.

I don't mind paying a premium for quality, especially since it helps me make money, but I fail to see the reason behind not releasing any of this information.

John Hamilton, post: 385298, member: 640 wrote: ... Carlson and other third party DC makers don't support the Trimble gear that it must not be possible to reverse-engineer the interface, or at least very difficult.

Something to bear in mind when purchasing new or second hand equipment.

One of the difficult parts to decode was a random character following the main text. eg

SOH Start of Heading
C Uppercase C
T Uppercase T
STX Start of Text
? Question mark
B Uppercase B
A Uppercase A
T Uppercase T
ETX End of Text
R Uppercase R
EOT End of Transmission
CR Carriage Return
LF Line Feed

I thought it might be some kind of checksum or validation, which was correct but i would have never decoded the formula, unless i was Alan Turing.
It's called BCC presumably Byte Check Code.

BCC= (S MOD 40h) + 20h (h = hex)
‰ÛÏS‰Û in above formulae is the lower one byte of the total sum from ‰ÛÏSender code‰Û
to ‰ÛÏETX‰Û (=before BCC). ‰ÛÏBCC‰Û can be any value between 20h and 5Fh
* Compare the BCC in the received data and the calculated value.
If they are the same, the communication was successfully done.

Before i implemented this in my Android app I wanted to understand how values are calculated in Excel. Attached is a PDF showing this.

A side effect of taking trying to code my own Android data recorder.
I have the control codes to get and set temperature and pressure.

Whist I'm in the field, I always try to be methodical and vigilant to keep this updated, but with all the other things to do I wished that this was automated in some way.

Now I can get the temperature and pressure from an android phone, and compare it to the total station, if it is out by a certain value I can raise an notification on the phone and / or set the value. Though I can't keep the phone in my pocket !