For literally years, we’ve heard people complain, “Ugh, I wish multibeam sonars weren’t so expensive…” Well, thanks to some other humans who felt the same, the Sonoptix ECHO was born. It offers a sweet set of capabilities at a revolutionary price point and will totally elevate your ROVing experience.
With this launch, we are releasing the BlueROV2 Roof rack. Yes, like a roof rack for your ROV. No, not so you can strap an ROV to the top of your car (although now that you mention it….)
Interesting product. Somewhat disappointed there’s no raw mode. Since the only way to receive data is a video feed is there a way to turn off all the overlays? We would be interested in using this in realtime in a robotics context so all of the grid lines etc. are a deal breaker.
From the user manual it doesn’t look like there’s an option to turn off the grid lines in the video stream output, but the user manual does mention there being an API, so it may be possible to get the data more directly via that (it seems you currently need to contact Sonoptix for the details of this).
I’ve asked internally whether we know more about that / can help facilitate that data access somehow (and will get back to you if so), but I agree that raw data access would make this more useful for applications beyond just during manual human control.
I suppose if it was critical to use the video stream as-is then the data extraction program could just ignore the values where the grid line pixels are, but intentionally ignoring data that the sensor is collecting definitely seems suboptimal.
Thanks, fingers crossed they have good news on that API. I’ve also reached out to NORBIT to get more information. But agreed, as is it seems like it’s positioned toward human consumption…
Wow ok, sounds unfinished… thanks for the update on that. We’re super interested but would want to see what the raw data output will look like before purchasing. Whenever you guys get that information would be great to see (or post to product page). Thanks!
Sorry for the delay in joining this discussion group. The Sonoptix ECHO is under our BlueLink umbrella and “we” have been quietly improving the capabilities of the unit as well as working to provide the API/SDK. The API package is currently available and the SDK should not be too far away from a beta release with a couple test partners. If you’d like to receive the API package, please send an email to jeff@blue-linked.com.
I’d like to add that we just released software update 1.2.0 which adds some nice new features and extends the maximum range to 200m. Please got to https://sonoptix.com/software-updates for more info and the file download.
Great updates so far, thanks for keeping us updated. Any chance there will be a pathway to get binned ranges or some other form of raw data rather or in addition to the compressed video stream?
