Nikon D7100 not receiving consistent GPS from Qstarz BL-1000ST

[orbitalplanets]

Hello,
Just updated my Unleashed 18 to the new firmware (A: 2.0.1, B: 2.0.0, C:2.0.0).
I've been trying to get GPS data from connecting the Unleashed to an external GPS Receiver: Qstarz BL-1000ST.
My main use case is geotagging - turn on camera with Unleashed, turn on GPS, get Geotagged photos.

A few issues identified which weren't present in the old Firmware:
- GPS does not automatically connect to Unleashed after power cycle of GPS, or Camera, or Unleashed.
- Sometimes able to get GPS to connect to Unleashed by using the Android App. Sometimes I need to power cycle GPS and then turn off and on the 'accessory' toggle. I can see GPS data being delivered. Then stops after a few seconds sending GPS data, although bluetooth is still connected.

The Qstarz GPS has LEDS to show GPS signal acquired and Bluetooth connected, so I believe the issue is on the Unleashed side, not the GPS receiver. The external GPS functionality is now very buggy and too inconsistent.

Any thoughts? Thanks,
Tom

[Oliver]

Hi and sorry for the trouble.

We just discovered and fixed an issue with external accessories - we will try to get an update released next week.

And there's another bug specific to the Qstarz - we've had other reports of issues, but have never been able to recreate the behaviour, which makes it very difficult to diagnose and fix. We're in direct contact with the manufacturer to make sure we're not misinterpreting any data, but have not been able to find any issues with the code.
We do have an idea for a failsafe that we're planning to implement in the next few weeks, but to be honest, we'd rather find the root cause of the issue and fix that...

[Oliver]

We’ve done quite a bit of work on the Accessories - in general, and with Qstarz in particular. We’ve just released an app update that contains the new and improved firmware.
I actually found a major bug in the condition to reconnect to accessories when using Accessories without an active connection to the app - I have no idea how we missed that. (In the condition when to try to reestablish a connection, we were checking for a “false” instead of a “true”… it’s amazing it worked at all most of the time)

I double-checked, and did not find any flaws in the actual parsing, but if for some reason the QStarz drops a packet, or we get an additional unexpected packet, this might have thrown off everything, without any good failsafes. So I added several additional safeguards to our Qstarz protocol parsing.

Let me know your results when you’ve had a chance to do some testing!

[orbitalplanets]

I've done some testing over the last days with my QSTARS GPS and unleashed, and updated to the latest firmware.

1. Can you tell me if the unleashed should reconnect to the QSTARS GPS after a power cycle?
If I unplug the unleashed from the camera, or if I have the camera battery run out, or if I remove the battery, I am not able to reliably reconnect to the QSTARS. The connection takes a long time to re-establish, or it never re-establishes (>10 minutes). The only way to reconnect is to re-pair the bluetooth units using a phone.

At the moment, I have removed the small cable since geotagging should be possible without it. However, with or without the cable, it does not work.

2. With the camera off, the unleashed still draws power and after a week or two stored away (camera off, unleashed still plugged in), the battery is empty. Is this normal? This was the case with all firmware I've used? Can you post your recommended settings to avoid battery consumption when camera is off.
This is my use case:
Turn on QSTARS, turn on camera, automatically re-establishes bluetooth connection and sends GPS data to camera. After initial pairing, I don't want to use the cell phone and would like the QSTARS to provide the GPS data. if I turn off the camera, it should cut power to the unleashed so it doesn't drain the battery.

Thanks,
Tom

[toorude]

Tom's post pretty much sums up my own experience with the Unleashed so far: No reliable GPS reconnection, battery drain. With the new firmware, I will give it another try during the next two weeks, but it will need a long time of flawless performance until I gain any confidence in it, unfortunately.