Connecting Tritech Micron to BlueROV2

Third Party Products Sonar and Acoustics
1

Goodday everyone, was wondering if anyone could help me with the requirements for connecting the Tritech Micron to the Blue ROV2, have one here sitting down and would like to have it mounted and operational.

Tritech MicronNav 100
2

Hi @MathieuPollonais, welcome to the forum :slight_smile:

I’m not familiar with the Tritech Micron, but from the datasheet it seems to support either RS-232 or RS-485 serial communication. You’ll likely need RS-485 configured.

If you’ve got a spare pair in your tether you may be able to use RS-485 to send the signal directly to the topside, and then connect to it “as normal” (per the manufacturers specification/usage instructions) from the topside computer.

Alternatively you might be able to use a USB-Serial converter (like our BLUART) in the enclosure to connect the sonar to the onboard computer, and then set up a routing connection to the topside. You’d need to check that the software that runs on the topside computer is able to connect with UDP instead, or you may need another routing software on the surface that converts from UDP back to more standard serial.

I noticed you put this in the “Blue Robotics Software / Ping Viewer” category, which I’ve moved it out of. While Ping Viewer is open source and could be extended to support additional sonar protocols, or a sonar could add support for our ping-protocol (or have its messages translated into it), those haven’t been done for the Tritech Micron. There’s a bit more discussion on that here :slight_smile:

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Thanks a lot Eliot, will let you know how everything goes. And thank you for the warm welcome.

4

Hi @MathieuPollonais,
Did you ever integrate the Micron Sonar?

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Micron-Sonar
Micron-Sonar1000Ă—758 206 KB

Is it possible to install Tritech Micron sonar upside down under the ROV?

6

Hi Eliot, hope you’re well.

I am attempting to connect a Tritech Micron sonar to Navigator so we can access it via ethernet through the tether. If we decide to go the USB route, would any RS232-USB converter work?

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Hi @kurty!

I am, thanks - hope you are too :slight_smile:

The Navigator flight controller board doesn’t have ports that could connect to this, and the ArduPilot firmware doesn’t have a driver for communicating with it (and you likely wouldn’t want your autopilot communicating with the sonar directly). You can likely connect it to the onboard Raspberry Pi though, and use the Serial Bridges functionality built into BlueOS to make it available over the network. Note that the caveat I mentioned previously does still apply:

From the product manual it seems the communication ports can be configured as either RS232 or RS485, so you’d need to make sure your adapter can handle whichever one it’s configured to (the one you’ve linked can seemingly be switched between them).

While I think that most adapters should work, the manual does specify some requirements to ensure safe and robust operation:

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Thanks for the great info. And yes, I meant the RPi USB port, not the Navigator. We won’t need to integrate with autopilot, just provide signal from the device to the topside application directly via ethernet over either the BR copper tether (FX-TI) or via pure IP over our fiber optic tether.

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Hi Eliot, we’re trying to use this RS232-USB converter to access the Tritech sonar over the standard ethernet tether connection. Do we need to do anything to activate the USB port on the RPi? The USB converter is powered up but it’s not showing any TX or RX activity. The device will need a virtual com port on the topside computer, but we’re not sure if we need to do something in BlueOS to make it discoverable. Thanks.

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Have you set this^ up?

I believe that’s normal if it’s not actively being communicated with/through.

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So we tried to set up the port using Serial Bridges for the Tritech Micron Scanning Sonar. We tried setting up the USB port as a server assuming the topside app acts as a client, but our config app is unable to discover the device to set up a virtual COM port. Any thoughts?

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Hi @kurty -
Are you using the virtualHere extension? The Serial Bridge functionality in BlueOS just directs traffic to the target you specify - you may need software on your topside computer to translate those incoming packets into a virtual comm port. That’s why virtualHere can be a bit easier to implement!

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Thanks Tony. We have software on the topside to create the virtual COM port, but it isn’t seeing the device. We’ll try the Virtual Here extension and see if that helps.

15

Hi Tony, we installed the VirtualHere extension, but it doesn’t show up in the BlueOS menu. Is it configurable or does it just run in the background?

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Hi @kurty -
It runs in the background, and you run a client application on your topside computer to access devices plugged into the Pi seamlessly, as mentioned here.

You’ll need the client software linked on the extension github here.