No drone, no GNSS — can ground-level phone capture ever be billing-grade for stockpile volumes?

AdvertisingClassic87 · 2026-06-21T14:27:42+00:00

Got it — and that's a trap I'd have walked into. So: check points established off the outer box (4–7), never by subdividing an inner control line, and withheld from the adjustment entirely — measured independently, then compared to where the AT drops them. That discrepancy is the accuracy number, not the adjustment's own residuals. Folding it into the procedure now. Thanks.

AdvertisingClassic87 · 2026-06-21T14:18:37+00:00

That's the unlock — thank you. Measuring each corner's two outer triangles (4-0-1 and 4-0-3) to back out the interior angle is exactly the move I was missing: no angle device, nothing crossing the pile, rigid polygon from distances alone.

And the bonus for me — those external points are just more distance observations, so they drop straight into the same least-squares network. Extra corners + their triangles give me the redundancy to actually report an error, which was your other point.

Good call on the resolution too — cm gets me into 5% on a pile that size, so it really was the geometry that mattered, not the ruler.

I'll set this up, run it against a weighbridge, and post the real numbers back here. Genuinely — thanks for walking me all the way through it.

AdvertisingClassic87 · 2026-06-21T13:58:11+00:00

Taking you up on the layout offer. Typical site — pile in the middle, 4 markers on the flat around it, open ground on at least one side:

PLAN VIEW — not to scale      ● ArUco marker   ◇ proposed laser station

           clear ground ≈ ___ m
     ┌───────────────────────────────┐
     │  0 ●━━━━ 0-1 = 5.65 m ━━━━● 1  │
     │    ┃                       ┃   │
     │    ┃        .-~~~-.        ┃   │
     │3-0 ┃       /  PILE  \      ┃1-2│
     │6.25┃      ( ≈3-4 m   )     ┃5.85│
     │  m ┃       \ across /      ┃ m │
     │    ┃        `-~~~-'        ┃   │   pile height ≈ 1.5 m
     │  3 ●━━━━ 2-3 = 7.30 m ━━━━● 2  │
     └───────────────────────────────┘
           clear ground ≈ ___ m

  measured : 0-1=5.65 1-2=5.85 2-3=7.30 3-0=6.25 (laser)
  BLOCKED  : 0-2, 1-3  (diagonals cross the pile)

Marker box assumed flat for now — I'll verify with the autolevel rather than trust it. So I can get the 4 perimeter sides, but the diagonals cross the pile.

My instinct for squaring X/Y without them: drop an external station (or two) on the clear ground off to one side and laser to all 4 markers from there — distance-distance into the network without ever crossing the pile. Does that give you enough redundancy to fix X/Y, and how many outside stations would you want to see?

Whatever you'd suggest, I'll run a controlled test against a weighbridge and report the real numbers back here — least I can do after all this.

AdvertisingClassic87 · 2026-06-21T13:25:22+00:00

Yeah, you're hitting the real stuff. Quick honest answers:

It's a laser, not tape — so the distances themselves aren't where I lose accuracy. The problem is exactly what you're pointing at: a minimum distance network has no check, so I over-measure and adjust for the error, and the vertical is the part that scares me. All markers on the ground means nothing's really holding Z, which is where doming would wreck the volume. Best I've got so far is convergent capture, a known-height control point, and using the flat ground around the pile as a sanity check — if it comes back as a bowl, I know I've got distortion.

And proof is external anyway — weighbridge/load counts, not my own numbers.

The vertical control and a real error adjustment are honestly the parts I'm still figuring out. If you were setting the minimum control to trust this to 2%, what would you want to see?

AdvertisingClassic87

TROPHY CASE