DVL A50 - Serial or Ethernet or both

Third Party Products Sonar and Acoustics
1

Hi Folks,

We’re trying to decide which cobalt connectors to use on our ROVs for connecting an A50 DVL.

We can either:
A. Use a 6pin hybrid and have a flexible port for any ethernet connected devices that also require 12V. (4pins for ethernet and 2 for power)
Or
B. Use an 8pin connector, and have 4 pins for ethernet, 2 for power, and 2 for serial.

I believe the A50 will only provide per sensor reporting over serial, but I don’t know the advantages of per sensor reporting.
Could somebody tell us what we might lose in future if we didn’t have the serial connection (and per sensor reporting)?

If the Serial data is worth keeping:
The cobalt 8 core cable says it’s rated for 3A per core.
The DVL A50 has a 35W “power on current surge” (est 3.5A @10V) but a 4W avg continuous power.
I’m assuming the 35W “power on current surge” for the DVL wouldn’t cause the cables to be damaged as it may only go over the current limit for a brief period.

2

Hi, I haven’t tried serial on it, but I have a couple of notes:

You need ethernet for accessing their web UI, which is how you update the software and how the current BlueOS interacts with it. It does also show some per-transducer metrics, but I’m not sure if these are the ones you are talking about.

We do use 4S batteries, which at 13v (I don’t like going that low, but that is up to discussion) means the dvl will pull at most ~2.7A.

Edit: it does look like the per-transducer report is available in tcp:
https://waterlinked.github.io/dvl/dvl-protocol/#velocity-and-transducer-report

3

Hi William,

Thanks for clearing that up. I must have read something outdated, I didn’t realise we could get per sensor reporting over tcp (ethernet).
Also thanks for clarifying the minimum voltage which is higher than I expected.