Omniscan 450 ss testing and visualizing issues

Third Party Products Sonar and Acoustics
1

We integrated Omniscan 450 ss on Blue Boat and tried to visualize the bottom of a lake. However, we were not able to reproduce anything similar to the topography mapping shown in the examples.

  1. When we rotated the boat, the covered area on SonarView also rotated. However, when we made horizontal movements, the covered area did not change with the movement. On the bottom right of the screen, where the coordinate information is supposed to be shown, the number was not changing with the movement of the vehicle. We think the GPS signal might not have been imported to SonarView for some reason (because the GPS signal was available in QGroundControl). Is there a way to further identify the issue and resolve it?

  2. In addition to the GPS issue, we had a hard time making sense of the output from SonarView. And therefore, we found it difficult to verify if the sonar was working properly. We conducted an experiment in a lake with a depth of around 3 meters. But everything shown on SonarView looked very much like noise.
    Some tests we conducted –
    (a) Knowing the GPS might have some issues, we lifted the Blue Boat from the ground and tried to visualize several known obstacles while rotating, but not moving. But the signal still looked like noise. Is an off-water test feasible for Omniscan 450 ss? How should we tune the parameters?
    (b) We tried to cover one side of the Omniscan 450 ss, but there was no difference shown in SonarView. How can we ensure that both sides are working properly?
    (c) The signal lights on the Ethernet switch were all blinking. While the ones connected to the Raspberry Pi (Port 1) and the Wifi Router (Port 5) were blinking very fast. Ports 2 and 3, which connected to the two omniscan boards, blinked only at the frequency of ~1Hz. Is this normal?

2

Hi @ichen -
It sounds like you need to properly configure the SonarView extension session to receive GPS input. See the setup instructions here! Without the software knowing how the boat is moving, I would expect making any visualization make sense would not be possible…

It’s also worth noting that while the Omniscan SS does provide depth data, it is primarily intended as a sidescan sonar - a single beam or multibeam sonar is more suited to mapping topography. Learn about the different types of sonar here!

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3

I’ll add that in testing the Omniscan 450 SS out of the water, the expected result will look like noise. The transducer is very much optimized for operation in water so performance in air is extremely poor.

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4

Thanks for the heads up about out of water tests.

5

Hello @tony-white
Thanks for the reply. We did configure the SonarView extension following the instruction. The screenshot of the configuration is attached below.

Screenshot (1)
Screenshot (1)1920×1080 194 KB

We also conducted another test on the pond where we still found that only the rotational movement was captured and mapped by SonarView. At the meantime, the GPS signal is still visible on QGroundControl.
The log file is also attached here.

6

Hi @ichen -
Please try changing the address for the mavlink2rest connection in your vehicle configuration to 192.168.2.2:6040, rather than blueos.local - that should do the trick!

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7

Thanks, Tony. We were able to connect to the GPS after changing the configuration. It is working now.

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