Looking to add a high(er) frequency sidescan than the cerulean 450 and thus looking at blueprint subsea 992 H or OEM. The issue is both are USB and both require a seperate USB GPS receiver.
To get USB back from boat to the laptop can we use USB over ethernet or is there an alternate way?
Has anyone integrated a decent 1mhz+ sidescan sonar to a blueboat? our application is victim recovery in fresh waters… We’d like to do planned routes and then map in reefmaster or some other software akin (sideview/hypack/sonarwiz)
any successful sonar integrations (with GPS) and software programs that other might have used/would reocmmend would be appreciated…
Hi @BCHOSU -
Perhaps the BluePrint subsea StarFish 990F XD (tow-fish) would be easier to integrate?
In either case, the USB connection can be forwarded by plugging it into the Raspberry Pi 4, and using VirtualHere or USBIP extensions to forward the data to your control computer (as mentioned in this guide.) This does mean that you will lose data if the radio connection is lost or low quality…
The same procedure could be done with a USB GPS, but this is likely to provide the same (or worse) location data that is already available from the BlueBoat. I’m not familiar with their software, but perhaps it’s possible to receive GPS data via NMEA stream over UDP? If so, this data could potentially be forwarded from BlueOS as well…
Contacting BluePrint subsea and encouraging them to develop their own BlueOS extension for their sonars would unlock a large potential market for them! This would also let the data continue to be collected even when the system is out of radio range, just like the Omniscan SideScan and SonarView extension from Cerulean accomplishes…
We’ve seen customers have good results with this approach, despite its lower frequency, identifying seagrass beds and other objects -however if operating outside of very calm conditions, the picture quality can suffer. This sea-state requirement is likely even more critical for a higher frequency system, but the tow-fish approach may circumvent the issue?
Let us know if you give anything a try, and we’d definitely like some prices to add to our comparison !