Use of Ping360 Scanning Sonar in a Base Oil Medium

Blue Robotics Products Ping Sonar Devices
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Hello,

I was wondering if the Ping360 scanning imaging sonar can work in a base oil medium, specifically, a highly refined, hydroprocessed, paraffinic base stock used in lubricant formulations. If so, are there any particular calibrations that need to be considered in order to perform acoustic imagery?

Thank you.

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Hi @issam, welcome to the forum! :slight_smile:

I can’t say I’m familiar with that kind of oil, but I don’t see expect it would be problematic, as long as it doesn’t react with the anodized aluminium casing, the polyurethane cable jacket, or the flouro-elastomer (FKM) rubber seal in the penetrator.

I don’t expect that’s likely (they’re all materials that are designed to be non-reactive to a variety of chemicals), but it’s potentially worth you checking some Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) for your material to confirm.

The sonar itself shouldn’t need calibration, but note that our Ping Viewer software currently expects the speed of sound in the operating medium to be between 1450-1550 m/s (which is well-suited to water of various salinity levels), so if you want to use that software, need accurate distance estimates for your application, and your oil’s speed of sound is too low for that range then you’ll need a modified version of the software.

It’s open source, so you can either fork it and make a custom build yourself, or we can make a build for you if you let us know the operating system you’re using and the speed of sound you need :slight_smile:

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Can you bullet point the basic-steps for making the fork, for a larger sound speed range, on Windows 11?
I’d like to give it a try.
Thank You!

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  1. Make a GitHub account (if you don’t already have one)
  2. Go to the Ping Viewer repository
  3. Click “Fork” in the top right corner, and create your own fork
  4. Go to the “Actions” tab, and enable them (this will allow your modified code to automatically be built into an application you can run)
    • All steps above here only need to happen once, as part of the initial setup
  5. Return to the “Code” tab, click the “master” dropdown (in the top left, under the repository name) and choose a name for your custom branch (e.g. “a-sound-decision”), then click the Create branch button
    • It’s a good idea to create a new branch for every change you make
    • you normally want to sync changes from the upstream master branch to your one before you create your own branch, so you get the latest changes, but if you’ve just created the fork then you’ll already be synced
  6. Find the code you want to change
  7. Go to that file in your fork, click the edit pencil in the top right corner, and modify the code as desired
    • You can also press . to open a browser-based code editor, but that’s mostly relevant if you have multiple files you want to edit at once, for example
  8. Commit your changes (via the button in the top right), and write a relevant commit message
    • We generally use a convention of path: file/system: change description, so something like qml: Ping360ControlPanel: increase speed of sound range would make sense here
  9. Go to the Actions tab, click the Build & Deploy one for your change, scroll down to the Artifacts section, and download your custom version (once it’s finished building)
  10. Test your version, and confirm that your changes do what you hoped for
  11. If you think the changes you’ve made are relevant to other users of the software, you may wish to contribute them back to the main repository, which you can do by submitting a pull request
    • Pull requests are reviewed by core developers of the software, who will request any relevant changes, and merge it in (if it’s aligned with the standards and official vision for the project), after which it will be officially available in the next release version

It is also possible to download, modify, and build the code locally on your computer, it’s just more of a process to get things set up, and isn’t generally necessary if you’re only making small changes like this :slight_smile:

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Thank you Elliot and Blue Robotics!
Ya’ll are changing how the world works!

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