I had had a license of SurvPC sitting around the office not getting much use, and I have been seeing the proliferation of tablets in the consumer market and wondering if I might be able to utilize SurvPC on same. So, as an experiment, I purchased an HP tablet, the Envy 8 Note. Great performance/price ratio. Downside - it is not in any way a rugged tablet, and it is newly released so there are not even any custom cases yet available. Nonetheless, at $329 delivered, I thought I'd see what could be done. Worst case, I give the tablet to my son.
I'm posting my steps and results here.
1. Download the latest version of SurvPC from Carlson's website.
2. Install SurvPC using the .exe file you downloaded in step 1.
3. When it is finished installing, reboot the computer. Failure to do this may cause an error upon opening the program, as I experienced.
4. Refrain from running SurvPC, until the settings have been edited.
5. Carlson's Knowledge Base no. 983 explains how to edit the Compatibility Settings for SurvPC, which I'm summarizing in step 6 below.
6. Using Windows Explorer, etc. find the location of the survpc.exe file on your tablet (for me, on Windows 10, I found it at C:Program Files (x86)Carlson SurvPC). Right click this file and select Properties. Select the Compatibility tab.
7. The knowledge base article suggests that checking the box entitled "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings" might solve certain display issues. And, it may on some tablets. For me, although checking this box improved things, there were still display issues that caused certain portions of the SurvPC interface to be inaccessible.
8. The solution that seems to have worked for me is to leave "Disable display scaling" unchecked, and check the box entitled "Run in 640 x 480 screen resolution". See screen shot below:
8. After this is done, I would recommend re-booting the tablet. Then run SurvPC and see what you get.
9. For me, at this point, although the resolution of the screen was much reduced running SurvPC (as would be expected given the settings above), it was well proportioned and readable, and all portions of the program appear accessible.
10. However, I noted and was able to resolve one fairly significant glitch - the Windows taskbar. At the reduced resolution, the taskbar takes up a huge amount of screen space. The solution to this was to click the Windows/Start button in the lower left, and choose Control Panel>Appearance and Personalization>Taskbar and Navigation>Taskbar tab>and Select "Auto-hide the taskbar".
Thanks to Carlson's support team for providing some helpful assistance with this. I hope these few notes might be helpful to someone else aiming to run SurvPC on a tablet.
Below is a picture showing what SurvPC looks like on my tablet. Looks like a Windows CE device on steroids. Good luck!
How did you connect it to your instrument? Blue tooth? USB? I tried doing the same thing with an HP Stream 8, but without success (using bluetooth).
rfc, post: 357995, member: 8882 wrote: How did you connect it to your instrument? Blue tooth? USB? I tried doing the same thing with an HP Stream 8, but without success (using bluetooth).
I made the connection between the HP tablet and the Sokkia SRX3 robot using Bluetooth. I didn't have any problem making the connection. Where did you get stuck?
Big Al, post: 357996, member: 837 wrote: I made the connection between the HP tablet and the Sokkia SRX3 robot using Bluetooth. I didn't have any problem making the connection. Where did you get stuck?
I tried using a serial-bluetooth adaptor (but not the Paranis that seem to work). Got USB to work, but the USB port on the Stream is flaky and not robust enough for field use.
I didn't have any adapters in between the instrument and the tablet. I suspect that may be the difference. One technique you might employ to solve the problem is to verify that the same adapter that you tried using on the tablet will work with another (proven) data collector running SurvPC. If so, make sure to copy the settings over when you try running it on the tablet. That should help to sort out what's going on. What data collector were you using?
I was able to experiment with using the tablet to connect via SurvPC to my Topcon Hiper Pro instruments on the MaCORS real time network. Again, worked great.
I noticed two interesting things:
1. Exiting out of SurvPC using the Windows system (as opposed to using File>Exit>Yes in SurvPC) appears to leave Windows in the 640 x 480 resolution, which is undesirable to me. I would advise exiting using SurvPC to avoid this potential problem.
2. The other thing I noted isn't really to do with tablet, but I learned recently that my Hiper Pro receivers are capable of running at 5 Hz (kudos to Michael Glutting at Javad for pointing me in this direction). I never experimented with this setting in SurvCE or SurvPC (thinking either that my receivers or Carlson, or MaCORS would not allow it) but when enabled, it significantly speeds up the processing. I was glad to discover this. Of course, it'll use more cell data, but this doesn't appear to be a limiting factor at the moment.
Al