How to display Ping1D data from USV using PingViewer on Ground Station

Slarskey · October 7, 2020, 3:18pm

Good morning,

I purchased the Ping1D to mount on a boogie board a few months ago to do some basic freshwater mapping with a USV for my senior capstone. I’m using an RPi and Navio2 with Sik 915MHz telemetry radios and have collected 30,000+ data points that I’ve gridded up using Matlab. These surveys were done using the default parameters from Blue Robotics, and without any post-processing. I can run the board on either MP or QGC, but would like to be able to run PingViewer on my laptop at the same time to see the data coming in in wave form, as well as adjust the gains, and sound speed. I’ve been digging around in the forums for a few weeks trying to wrap my head around things since I’m still new to configuring/troubleshooting robotics, but I was wondering if someone could steer me in the right direction to be able to adjust these parameters and model the data on the fly for a USV. Any tips or tricks would be greatly appreciated and I’d be happy to share the results of this project once I get a little more functionality out of it.

Thank you for your interest,
-Jake

patrickelectric · October 8, 2020, 7:02pm

Hi @Slarskey,

You’ll need to add a second radio or connect via wifi/4g with your vessel to create a communication link with your vehicle and ping-viewer.
Since you’re using a single radio that’s using mavlink to do the communication, is not possible to use the same radio to transmit both mavlink and ping-protocol at the same time.

Slarskey · October 14, 2020, 2:09pm

Thank you for your help Patrick. I am now unable to connect the sonar to Mission Planner and QGC. Here is what I have configured on the RPi and in mission planner. I’ve looked through old forum posts about how to connect it which worked while I collected my initial dataset, but now it is not registering. Is there something that I am overlooking in the configuration?

Best,
-Jake

Slarskey · October 14, 2020, 4:38pm

Update: Ping1D is now working again, it was an issue with Mission Planner not wanting to reboot after I wrote the parameters. Now I believe all I need to do is configure the udp network for data transfer in order to connect to the RPi to PingViewer and model the data.

Slarskey · October 21, 2020, 1:31pm

Another update-

I’ve installed the bluerobotics-ping python packages on the RPi in order to connect to the device via UDP. I’ve been looking at the device manager guide on the bluerobotics website and my understanding of it is that I need to configure it to know which port to look for the device on in the python module. When I enter python -m brping/pingproxy --device /dev/ttyAMA0 in the command line, which is the final line of the device manager guide, I get an error message saying that there is no module named brping/pingproxy. I double check that these packages I just downloaded do exist by entering: ./.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages (both 0.1.0 and 3.4) and /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (0.16.0), I get a message saying that there is a directory.

My question is, what am I missing in the configuration process in order to specify where Ping1D can request data to be passed over the UDP connection, allowing me to connect to PingViewer and and see the data coming in?

My apologies for crowding the forum with novice questions, I’m still learning how to get things to talk to each other.
Best,
-Jake

patrickelectric · October 22, 2020, 12:29pm

You have installed the library under python3 and you are probably calling python2, try:
python3 -m brping/pingproxy --device /dev/ttyAMA0

If you want to communicate with the sensor via UDP, you can use the port 9090, the sensor when connected while running the companion image, will be provided automatically under this port.

Slarskey · October 23, 2020, 3:06pm

Hi Patrick,

When I call python it does run python3. The issue is that when I did pip install, it did not install pingproxy. So when I try and connect over UDP with the port 9090, it does not connect. Is the companion image something I can download right from github on the raspberry pi? I poked around there and did not see it.

Slarskey · October 23, 2020, 3:18pm

By companion image, do you mean the Raspbian Image? I’m looking around now to see if I can install ping proxy as well.

patrickelectric · October 23, 2020, 3:21pm

Hi Jacob,

You can download our latest software version here:

If you installed bluerobotics-ping via pip, you should call pingproxy.py without problems, if you have installed it via your normal user, it should be under /home/user/.local/bin/pingproxy.py, or if you have installed with root, should be in /usr/local/bin/pingproxy.py, in both cases should be accessible without problems if your system is correct configured.

Slarskey · October 23, 2020, 3:33pm

I have found pingproxy.py under ‘/home/user/.local/bin/pingproxy.py’, but when I run
‘python -m brping/pingproxy --device /dev/ttyAMA0’ or ‘python -m pingproxy --device /dev/ttyAMA0’ it says that module pingproxy not found. How should I configure it to look for the right module?

patrickelectric · October 23, 2020, 3:34pm

you should just call pingproxy.py --device /dev/ttyAMA0

Slarskey · October 23, 2020, 4:02pm

I appended ‘/home/user/.local/bin/’ and ‘/home/user/.local/lib/’ to the python $PATH, and this is the error that it gave me.

patrickelectric · October 26, 2020, 11:44am

Sorry if I was not clear.
What you need to do is to login in your raspberry via ssh, access the terminal, and type:
pingproxy.py --device /dev/ttyAMA0

There is no need to open the python console or do anything else, pingproxy.py is a script that is accessible in your path, if your system path is correct. It’s not a module, it’s executable script provided by our bluerobotics-ping package.

Teggles · October 27, 2020, 2:38pm

Here is my version with Ping 1D. Works really well, especially in among weeds. No prop or thruster fouling!