Ping1D and Ping Viewer issue

Blue Robotics Products Ping Sonar Devices
1

Recently received one of these for testing on our floating water metric units. Previously used pressure-based depth/flow sensors. Anyway, connected via a UART←>USB dongle, and Ping Viewer (Windows version) doesn’t autodetect it, so I used manual detection to select the COM port, and it just constantly shows 0.00 and 0 confidence with sensor in water. The Ping Viewer doesn’t really seem to be checking anything though, I can disconnect the COM port and it still shows that it’s “receiving data” in the connection dialog, so not confident it’s actually working at all. Firmware update does nothing at all. Showing the current firmware version as 0.0, automatic update does nothing.

So I connected it to an old Arduino, and it does show data, but the distances are not realistic at all - mostly around 50000-70000 range, with confidence between 0 and 12.

Could it just be a faulty sensor? It’s pulling between 60-130mA@5V from a bench supply.

2

Hi @Scerion, welcome to the forum :slight_smile:

Sorry to hear you’re having an issue with one of our products.

For reference, ping1d is the name of a protocol message set, intended for 1-dimensional echosounder devices capable of communicating with the ping protocol. The device that Blue Robotics sell that uses that message set is called a Ping Sonar.

This is you telling Ping Viewer “I promise there’s a sensor here”, so it believes you, and blindly pretends there’s a sensor there, then it connects to the specified port and reports back whatever responses it gets. In this case it’s not getting any responses, so it just shows you its initialisation values.

This makes it sound like there’s a communication issue between the device and your computer.

If you haven’t already, it could help to go through the Ping Viewer troubleshooting checks.

That’s hard to comment on without knowing how/where you’re testing it, but it at least sounds like it’s not getting consistent echo responses that it can estimate a distance from.

If you want you can open it to check the transducer is plugged in, but I’d recommend trying to connect to it with Ping Viewer first, and/or getting some profile data to see whether it’s completely random or seems correlated with what it’s facing. It can work to some extent in air (albeit off by a factor of ~4.4, because of the sound speed difference), so if it’s working properly you should be able to get a more confident distance estimate just by putting it on a flat surface, and holding another flat surface above it.

The specified typical current draw (per the technical details in the product page) is 100mA, so that sounds pretty normal to me.

If those steps and checks don’t end up resolving the issue, I’d recommend you submit a product problem request, so our support team has the relevant information to help move things forward from there.