We are having trouble with connecting to the Ping 1D when connecting to the BlueROV. We have not had any trouble with connecting when directly connected to the PC, but are having trouble with connecting now that the Ping 1D is connected to the on-board Raspberry Pi. The companion version is 0.0.17.
We then noticed that on this post that there was a service called pingproxy and that ours didn’t have it. I then read that these services should be running when the companion computer is booted - is there something that we are missing that may be causing this issue? We figured that the 0.0.17 version of companion would be sufficient, but are not sure what our next steps would be.
Companion 0.0.17 is from before I started at Blue Robotics, but it did seemingly have at least some support for the Ping 1D. That said, there have been improvements since then to the Ping device integrations, and the Ping 1D firmware, so there’s some chance it won’t work without a specific Ping firmware version or something.
Assuming the Ping capabilities of 0.0.17 are indeed sufficient, my main guess would be that the sonar was not connected when the companion computer was booted, which is when it looks for Ping devices. If the device is plugged in afterwards (or not powered on early enough) then it may not be detected by the Companion computer, and accordingly the pingproxy service never gets started, and you’re not able to connect to the sonar from the topside computer.
By the way, is there a particular reason you’re trying to use Companion 0.0.17 specifically, and Companion in general? The last Companion release was 0.0.31, and Companion itself has been mostly replaced by BlueOS.
Thank you for the response! We upgraded companion to the latest release of 0.0.31, which fixed the issue. The 0.0.17 version was what came with the shipment and seeing that the documentation for ping says that companion version requires 0.0.16+ we didn’t think it would cause an issue.
There was a while where our production image was quite outdated from the latest stable one, but our software setup instructions have consistently had a section on updating to the latest versions as part of the ROV assembly and setup process, which would generally avoid this kind of issue occurring to start with.
Since there seemingly is an issue, I’ll see if I can get those docs for the Ping Sonar updated - thanks!
