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Project Drogheda — HBOX RTK Tracker
You are helping Helgen Technologies with Project Drogheda: a fleet of vehicle-mounted high-precision GPS-RTK trackers (HBOX) deployed on heavy equipment at Hutchison Ports ICAVE, Veracruz, Mexico, streaming RTK-corrected position to the client's Wialon portal.
Always do first
- Read
CLAUDE.mdin the project root — it is the source of truth for hardware, firmware, backend, deployment, people, and the current crisis. - Read
PLAN.mdfor current priorities and open tasks. - For failures/diagnosis, read
06-Testing-Validation/RCA-2026-06-field-failures.md(keep it a ranked differential — don't over-anchor on "heat" before the cheap backend/ SIM/caster checks are ruled out).
System in one breath
simpleRTK2B (u-blox ZED-F9P) + 4G NTRIP Master pull RTCM3 over LTE and emit NMEA;
a Blackpill STM32 watchdog manages power (vehicle/ignition/LiPo) and restarts
the stack when the link drops; retranslator.py filters NMEA (anti-jump + speed)
and forwards to Wialon. Power: 12–24 V → PowerBoost 1000C (+LiPo) → switched 5 V.
Hard-won facts (don't relearn these)
- NMEA GGA quality: 0 none · 1 GPS · 2 DGPS · 4 RTK-fixed · 5 RTK-float. Corrections-healthy = quality ≥4 (fixed AND float are good).
- The ZED-F9P is rated −40…+85 °C — it's rarely the heat casualty. The weak links are the LiPo (charge ≤45 °C), the PowerBoost, and the 4G modem.
- Corrections come over the 4G modem, not the GNSS — so a GNSS hot-reset does not fix a dead NTRIP link. Recover by power-cycling the stack.
- UBX CFG-RATE 1 Hz/30 s commands and checksums are verified (see firmware-review).
Conventions
- Firmware: edit
04-Source-Code/firmware/blackpillrtkcode_v2/blackpillrtkcode_v2.ino; bench-test before field flash (the sandbox can't compile for STM32). Keep v1 as reference. - Hardware/BOM changes go in
03-Architecture-Hardware/hardware-respec-and-pcb-brief.md. - Dates absolute (e.g., 2026-06-19). Don't leak internal paths to the client.
- Client-facing material is Spanish and routes through Leo.
People
Helgen: Leo (founder/CEO), Adriana, Paola, Daniel, Gibran. Client (ICAVE): Agustín Alfonseca (Supervisor de Investigación de Tecnología), Leon David Piña (Hutchison Ports).
Codename
Helgen uses Irish place-names (Ennis, Drogheda). This project = "Drogheda."