Transcript

Hi and welcome to this video which provides an overview of the ISP360 Profiler Sonar application within the Impact Subsea seaView Software.

Shown on the screen here is an example of what you’ll see when you first run seaView. On the left hand side you have a list of applications which are installed in seaView, in the middle of the screen you have any devices any Impact Subsea sensors which have been detected and on the right hand side of the screen we have a list of any communication ports and network ports which your computer has.

Now when seaView first runs it’ll automatically scan all communication ports at every known baud rate and your network as well for any Impact Subsea sensors. So this has happened and we’ve got two Impact Subsea ISP360 profilers that have been detected.

Shown here are the two tiles for them and so tiles give you some information about the the sensor connected, it’ll tell you the serial number, the firmware on it, it will also tell you how it’s been connected and both of these profilers are connected over our Network so we can see the IP address which both profiler has.

Now to start using the profiler you simply double click on the profiler and in this example we’ll use number 11 here and double clicking on the profiler, it will take you straight into the ISP360 profiling application and the profiler will automatically start to scan and generate points on screen. Now in this example here we’ve deployed the profiler into the Impact Subsea test tank which is a rectangle test tank so we’ll be getting imagery from that today.

Shown on the screen just now we can see the profiler scanning away. Right now it’s doing a sector scan of approximately 90° and it’s got a range of 10 m set. In the middle of the screen you’ve got your raw data on the right hand side of the screen you’ve got got any attitude data so the pitch and roll the sensor at the left hand side you have a number of settings and down at the bottom you’ve got the most common settings that you’re likely to need to change as you set up a profiler for a particular application.

I’ll run through the common settings initially. The first is you can select which profiler these apply to. Now in this example here we only actually have one profiler connected but if you have multiple profilers connected you can select all if you want the settings to apply to every profiler or you can select the individual profiler if you want to set up individual settings for each one. We’ll leave it set to all just now.

Gain adjusts the imagery on the screen. Right now we don’t have any imagery purely showing profiler points we’ll come back to Gain in a little while. Next you have the resolution setting so you can move this from Speed to Quality. If you move it towards Speed the profiler will take physically larger steps as it scans. It’ll scan very quickly on a 7.2° step. If you move it up towards Quality the profiler will take smaller and smaller steps. Right now set it to 0.225° so it’s taking a very fine steps and it’s generating a lot of points.

Then we have the frequency toggle so the ISP360 profiler is a wide bandwidth sonar you can run it anywhere from 650 khz up to 1.25 MHz when you’re running at 650 khz the profiler has a 2° conical beam and it’ll get longer range. When you run at 1.25 MHz the range comes down but the beam comes down as well down to 1° so you get a higher resolution imagery. You can toggle between the two frequencies just by moving that slider.

Next you’ve got a Bins and Sector, this is where you can manually adjust just the the sector if you want a very particular sector for the profiler to scan over. You can also set the number of Bins which are shown on screen. This is purely the number of samples which are shown on the the imagery on the screen itself.

You also have the option of Use Flyback. When Use Flyback is selected the profiler will scan one way and then fly back and then scan again so you can see that happening just now, it’s scanning one way, then it pauses, the transducer flies back to the right hand side and it scans again. If we disable Use Flyback the profiler will scan back and forth so you can see it continues to scan and generates points both directions.

The last box here is a quick sector selection so you can quickly tell the profiler which direction you want to profile around. By default the profiler I will start pretty much as shown on the screen here and it’s scanning about the North marker on the profiler itself but we can adjust this so if we wanted to do a full 360 degree scan so get points generated all around the profiler we can quickly adjust it to do just that. Lets drop the quality down a little bit so it takes bigger steps, generates points more quickly.

Down at the very bottom of the screen we have some more settings, the first is minimum range. The minimum range anything below this value the profiler will ignore and so generally it’ll be set to around .4 as that’s the minimum range the profiler can start generating points from but it’s a means to gate your data so if you know that the target you’re wanting to profile is say more than a meter away you can increase this to 1 meter and then it won’t generate any points within 1 meter of the profiler.

Likewise you can adjust your maximum range, right now it’s set to 10m but our tank is not 10m wide so we can reduce the range here down to a more shorter range, let’s say 3.5m that way we can get a closer look at our tank.

The last setting down here is energy threshold so the energy threshold allows you to dictate how many points are on the screen. So a threshold of zero, it’ll show you every single acoustic return that it’s detected and some of that may be noise so we’re getting a little bit of noise in the tank just now so what we can do is we can increase the energy threshold.

Increasing the energy threshold will remove the weaker profiling points and you can push that up until you’re at a point where you’re quite happy with the data you’re getting, you’re getting all correct data and there’s very little noise present. If you push it up too far you’ll find it removes a lot of the data and only the very strong returns will be left and so it’s good to adjust that to make sure that you’re happy with the data level.

Once you’re happy with the data level and you’ve got your required sector scan at that point you can set up an output from the profiler either log the data to a log file locally on computer or you can set up an output string to go out to a survey computer for external logging and external processing.

They’re the key settings that you’re likely to change on a day-to-day basis, just as you’re working through a project. The other settings you have down the side here, the very top one is the main settings for the profiler sensor itself. If you click on that, you bring up the profiler setup so this is the profiler we have here.

Here we can tell the depth it’s at, any rotation, we can add in here, if you’ve mounted the profile with a slight physical offset either on purpose or by accident, you can put in a manual rotation. It’ll just rotate all the imagery on the screen. This is particularly useful if you multiple profilers and you’re trying to overlap the imagery and ensure everything aligns up correctly.

You can also go into the settings of the profiler from here. These settings pages are similar to the other Impact Subsea sensors. The first is the Acoustics side so in here you can set this to Auto and it’ll adjust the Acoustics automatically for the range that you set. If you disable the auto function you can go in there and manually edit the Acoustics so you can edit the frequency it’s run at, you can change it to be a CHIRP you can change pulse length, pulse amplitude etc.

In general, unless you’re wanting to experiment with Acoustics or you’ve got a good understanding of Acoustics it’s best to leave that just checked to Auto, that way the Acoustics will be automatically adjusted for you and if you have multiple profilers the Acoustics will be adjusted accordingly.

You can also set your speed of sound here, you can select whether 16 bit or 8 bit data is used this is not so relevant if you have an ethernet connection but potentially if you’ve got a serial connection of quite low bandwidth you can drop the data down to 8 bit data. That will just speed up the the scan rate of the profiler. You can mirror the sonar image, so mirror sonar image by default the imagery on screen assumes that the profiler has been installed that way up.

If you select mirror sonar image, it tells the sonar that it’s been installed upside down. Mirror sonar image is selected just now because the profiler in the tank has been installed upside down.

The last acoustic item to cover here is we’ve got the IS³ mode. If you click on there you’ll find there’s Mode A and Mode B. Generally if you’re running just one profile at a time leave it set to Mode A. If you’re running two profilers have one profiler set to Mode A and the second profiler set to Mode B. This will reduce the interference between the two profilers, allow them to run together with minimal interference.

The next option you’ve got here is IS³ signaling scheme so you can adjust this to have a bias towards giving you the highest resolution of data or you can reduce it down to give you the longest range capability. If you go for the highest resolution data basically it sends a a longer, more complex code. It allows you to get a little bit better timing accuracy and it gives you a higher resolution of data. If you move it down towards range the code becomes shorter and simpler and extends the range out to the profiler. For most applications where you’re working under 10m in range it’s best just leave it set to the highest resolution setting.

Here you can also change the connection settings so you can change the communications mode of the profiler from RS232 to RS485 or RS485 Terminated where it’ll add the termination resistor automatically within the profiler itself. You can also set the baud rate. For maximum scanning speed you want the highest baud rate but if you’re running over very long length of twisted pair or older degraded twisted pair you may need to reduce that baud rate in order to maintain stable communications. If you’re running the profiler over a network you can set up the IP address, subnet mass, gateway etc.

Connection mode, if you’re running onto a network where IP addresses are automatically given, you can click use DHCP that will fit into the the network you’re connecting to. There’s other profiling options here. The first is the echo mode so when the profiler sends out a ping you can choose whether it Triggers on the first Echo it sees back or the strongest Echo.

The first Echo will trigger on any echo which comes back first so it might be the the target you’re looking for but it could also be a fish or suspended sediment or anything else which is in the water between the profiler and the target. If you select strongest Echo it’ll send out a ping it’ll listen to every single echo which comes back across the range I’ll pick the one of the highest amplitude which will generally be the target you’re looking for.

In this window you can also turn gating on and off so gating will speed up the profiler by telling it that you want to scan to a particular range. If you set the profiler to say a 1m range and you turn gating mode on, it’ll scan to 1m directly below it it’ll maintain that same 1m distance across the whole sector of the scan so if you do a 90° sector scan it’ll be one meter there and it’ll create 1m out to the end of the 90 it almost creates a rectangular range.

In the AHRS settings here you can tell the profile exactly how it’s installed for the purposes of giving you pitch and roll data so you can tell it, it’s inverted as we’ve shown here. You can change it to default if you want that way put around the other way this basically just changes the reference point from which pitch and roll are read. Any offsets on the the pitch and roll you can also enter in here as you’re using the turns counter you can also set up where count turns around.

That’s all the the main settings there so if we go back to the the main page here one other thing to show you actually is the the point color you can change the color of the points shown on screen so by clicking there and selecting a different color you can choose virtually any color that takes your fancy.

We’ve closed down the profiler setup the other options you’ve got down side here is you got pause and run and you can reverse the direction of the scan by clicking there. Here importantly you can set up your log format and output data.

If we click on this button here, at the moment we’ve got no outputs there’s nothing being output from the computer so we can click on Add Output and this will allow us to configure an output string. There’s several default strings in there, there’s Impact Subsea profiler string and the exact detail of that string that ASCII string is detailed in the ISP360 manual so if you have a look there you’ll see the the detail of that.

We can select whether this is saved to a log file or output on a comm port and if it’s output on the comm port you can set up the comm port and the baud rate and then you can click start output. It’ll start outputting that data you can see the data being output there as the profiler scans round. That’s raw profiling data which you can then utilise for servey purposes. If you want to stop the output just click stop and it’ll stop the data being output.

Going back to the settings here we’ve also got clear image if you click that it’ll just wipe the image on screen and start repopulating it with new data. You’ve got display options so this allows you to turn on and off various different parts of the display so you can turn on off the polar grid you can turn off the scan line if you wish and this one here is quite interesting this is the show image so if you turn show image on it will show you the raw sonar data kind of like Imaging sonar data, so you can see the raw acoustic environment which the profiler is operating in and it can help understand why it’s digitising certain points.

You can turn on of the coordinates if coordinates are on you get this little coordinates detail down here just showing where the cursor is located on the screen. You can turn on and off an XY grid, the scaling will be automatic but you can turn scaling off if you want to make the the grid smaller or finer.

You can adjust the point size here so you can make the profiler points smaller, it’s in pixels, or you can make them larger, really just to suit the display you’ve got and how big or small you want the points.

You can turn on and off the range display from the polar plot. You can turn the palette off from the left hand side you can turn the smoothing on and off smoothing and palette they really just refer to the image here so they affect how the image looks.

If you’ve got GPS feeding into the system you can turn the GPS display on off. You can also turn on and off the AHRS if you don’t want the pitch and roll showing from the profiler you can turn them on and off can also turn on and off the individual components of that as well.

If you’ve zoomed in to point to the display there’s a quick way to zoom back out again which is to click there and you can manually zoom in manually zoom out there you can also zoom in and out just by scrolling the mouse wheel as well which is often the easier option.

If you want to take a quick measurement on screen you can click the measurement tool and simply drag it across the screen like that and you can take a quick measurement so you can check measurements as they are on screen rather than trying to manually judge it.

If you’re doing a a pipe profiling application and you can turn on and off a pipe on screen which will allow you to place an overlay on the pipe which is being scanned.

If you have the imagery showing on screen you can adjust the color palette here so you can change it to different color palettes you can also adjust the threshold or the contrast there and the threshold here so adjust the imagery to suit. Of note the imagery shown on screen doesn’t affect the raw profiler output. This change here that’s purely a visual change, it won’t change the data being output from the system the data output from the system is basically all the digitized points that are shown on screen.

Other than that you can do a general log file you can start logging data here and you can save it to a log file. This will be saved in the Impact Subsea proprietary standard. This type of logging is really just to save the log file for replay through seaView again later on. Of note if you do save the log file here and then when you go to replay the log file you can then set up an output from that log file through a comm port or to a survey so there is always a means to extract the data out with seaView.

You can also open logs from here you can open previously save logs and replay them. Any notifications that seaView receives will be shown here so if you start logging, close logging, if a device is connected, if a device has got bad comms, maybe it’s a broken cable etc, you’ll get notifications here. which will guide you on what might need to be checked or inspected.

You can take a screenshot at any point so if there’s something on screen that’s of Interest, click the screenshot button, you can give the file a name, click the tick and it will save that image to your computer.

You can click this button to go full screen so it’ll just go to the full screen of your monitor and you’ve got another settings button here which is really to do with the seaView itself. Here you can set up where screenshots are saved, where log files are saved, which units you want to use, whether it’s a metric or imperial measurement system, any licenses you can activate here. There’s no licenses for the profiler and so this is really for FMD and ECHOGRAM and other sensors that we have.

You can select the styles you can change seaView from a dark theme to a light theme if you want. You can also adjust the font size of everything on screen so depending on the resolution of your monitor you can adjust things to look exactly as you like them. If you click on system, it’ll give you the system information so it’ll tell you the exact version of seaView and a few other details there if ever you have a technical question or a support issue, our team may ask you for this information just so we fully understand which version of seaView you’ve got.

Lastly if you click on the Impact Subsea icon it’ll take you to our website and on our website you’ll find more information about all of our sensors in terms of the ISP360 profiler, you’ll find the datasheet, the manual, 3D models of the device. If you want to have them to integrate into a model of your vehicle and more technical information as well.

For further information on the ISP360 please see our website at www.ImpactSubsea.co.uk

► OUR PRODUCTS ◄

► SUBSCRIBE ◄

► LETS CONNECT: ◄

👉 LinkedIn

👉 Twitter

👉 Facebook

👉 Instagram

► GET IN TOUCH ◄

EMAIL: info@impactsubsea.co.uk

PHONE: +44 (0)1224 460 850

Monday – Friday, 9AM – 5PM GMT

Transcript

Hi, welcome to this video covering the use of two Impact Subsea Profiler Sonars.

Shown on the screen is our seaView Software and seaView has automatically detected two profilers connected to the computer. When you first run seaView it’ll scan all your comm ports and all network connections looking for Impact Subsea sensors. In this case it’s identified two profilers.

To start the profiling process simply double click on one of the profilers. It’ll take you into the ISP360 profiling application. The profiler sonar will automatically start to scan and generate profiling points on screen. The default settings for the profiler is a 90° profiling window and a 10m range and 0.4m minimum range.

A number of these settings will need to be adjusted to suit the profiling application being undertaken. To add a second profiler to the system we go to the profiler setup settings button, click on that. This will bring up the window showing all profilers currently connected to this application. If we click the green plus button to add a profiler it’ll add a second profiler display to the window. At this point we can allocate a profiler to that display. It will allocate the second profiler. As soon as that is allocated, it’ll start to scan and generate data points on screen.

When you add a second profiler sonar it automatically adds offset of 10m so this needs to be adjusted to reflect the actual physical offset between the two profilers. In the test setup we have here, we’ve set a 1.46m offset between the two. Entering that offset will bring the two profiler images together and overlap the data accurately. By default, when you’re doing a survey or say a pipeline survey, the two profilers should be mounted side by side with the notch mark on the end cap pointing directly towards the seabed.

If there’s any angular error in this installation, potentially one of the profilers is rotated slightly you can enter a rotational offset here to correct for that misalignment. Our particular installation here we’ve got a misalignment in profile two of 3° so I’ll enter in a 3° offset here and it’ll just rotate the data by 3° which will give us a more consistent overlap of data and the seabed will look flat.

At this point we’ve got the two profile running, we’ve got the offset between them input and any rotational corrections added. By default the first profiler sonar points are all red and the second profile points are all green if you’re not happy with the colors you can click on the color and you can edit it in the color editor to any color of your choice.

At this point the two profilers are set up to run together so we can close down the profiler setup window. Down at the bottom of the screen you can configure each of the profilers. The first drop down to look at is all, profiler one, profiler 2. If it’s selected all, then any adjustments you make to the gain, the speed, the frequency, will automatically be set in both profilers at the same time.

If you want to make an adjustment to just one of the profilers you can select the profiler you want to make adjustment to, adjust the range, speed etc. Then you go to the second profiler and make any tweaks there. To get set up quickly you generally want both profiler sonars to have a similar setup so we’ll select all and we’ll set up our our ranges initially in this example here we’ve dropped two profilers into one of the Impact Subsea test tanks.

It’s a rectangular test tank. We’ve also dropped in a plastic pipe to simulate a pipeline sitting on the seabed. The pipeline we’ve or the plastic pipe we’ve put in is around about 2m away from the the profiler so we’ll set our minimum range to 1 meter as there’s nothing within a meter of the profiler which is of Interest so we don’t want any profiling points within a meter and we’ll bring our maximum range down to 2m. So that should give us everything that we’re interested in.

At this point we’ve got the two profiler sonars set to give us the the minimum range want and the correct maximum range. At this point we want to introduce an energy threshold so right now the energy threshold is set to zero which means the profilers are digitizing every Echo they hear back. We’re in an acoustic test tank which makes it quite acoustically noisy as sound bounces around so what we want to do is we want to increase that threshold basically to remove the weaker echoes in the tank and just leave us with the the stronger data, data we’d actually want to log an output for survey purposes.

At this point we can see the the wall of the tank and we can see the pipe sitting there as well. We’re getting quite nice data. You might want to fine tune each profiler sonar to get more points so for example if we go to profiler one, we can adjust the energy threshold, maybe just slightly down, just to give us a few more points off the tank wall.

The profiler two looks pretty good, we can also adjust the the gain now. This gain here only applies to the imagery on screen at the moment we’ve only got profiling data so the profiling data is the data which is output from the system to survey or to a log file.

We can also view the raw acoustic imagery. You click on display options and go to show image you’ll see the full acoustic environment which the profiler sees. At this point the the gain on screen can be adjusted. You’ll see the gain change, put it back to both profiler sonars we adjust the gain on both the images at the same time. You can also change the threshold for the background imagery, increase the contrast and you can change the the palette as well if you’re not happy with the the colors. Once you’ve got that, you can turn off the imagery and just view the raw profiler points.

Something else to be aware of so we’ve got the two profilers set up in the profiler setup here and if you click on the settings of either of the profilers you can actually get into more detailed settings for each profiler. One is the profiling setup so both profiler sonars are set to operate on strongest echo just now but what I want to discuss here is the acoustic setup.

If you leave acoustic set to Auto as you adjust the range of the profilers the acoustic settings will automatically be adjusted in the background by the software, that’s probably the best thing to do. One thing to bear in mind when you’re running two profilers is you want to set one profiler to have Mode A, IS³ Acoustics, the second profiler to have Mode B, IS³ Acoustics. This will assure that the two profilers do not interfere with each other as they’ll be using different signaling schemes.

That’s the two profiles drawing together gathering data. The data looks pretty nice, pretty clean so at this point we’d probably want to output that data either to a log file or to a third party computer or application.

You can configure a log or output data by clicking this button here and click add output, you can select from some of the predefined output strings. You can say whether you want to go to log file or comm port. We’ll set up for comm port here, triggered per ping, we’ll send it out COM3 and we’ll send it out to 115200. That’s set up and click on start output, it’ll output that data on that comm port.

That’s a basic overview of running two profiler sonars together, for more information on the ISP360 please go to www.ImpactSubsea.co.uk and there you’ll find a profiler page where you can download the datasheet, manual and other technical information.

► OUR PRODUCTS ◄

► SUBSCRIBE ◄

► LETS CONNECT: ◄

👉 LinkedIn

👉 Twitter

👉 Facebook

👉 Instagram

► GET IN TOUCH ◄

EMAIL: info@impactsubsea.co.uk

PHONE: +44 (0)1224 460 850

Monday – Friday, 9AM – 5PM GMT

These high-performance, mechanically scanned profiling sonars are a game-changer for subsea measurement. It boasts an impressive 1° Acoustic Angular Resolution, 80-meter range and a 0.35mm timing accuracy, making it ideal for applications like pipeline and trench profiling, as well as asset positioning.

Ready to learn more about the ISP360 and our full range of innovative sensors? Head over to the ISP360 Profiling Sonar page.

Transcript – ISP360 Profiling Sonars – Podcast

Okay, let’s unpack this. Imagine you’re trying to map, say, a complex underwater structure, maybe an oil field, or inspect a pipeline down there. Yeah. You need really precise data and fast. Exactly. And sometimes, you know, one sensor just isn’t enough. But then, how do you get multiple, really powerful systems to play nice together without interfering?

That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Well, welcome everyone to a deep dive into some pretty advanced Subsea tech. Today we’re looking at exactly that challenge. Specifically, how Impact Subsea V3 handles dual ISP360 sonars. These are for AUVs and ROVs, right? Those profiler sonars. Our insights are coming straight from an overview that demonstrates how this software actually works in practice.

So, our mission today to really get how these sensors work together, the specific hurdles they overcome and honestly, the kind of surprising precision needed for good underwater data. There are definitely some neat tricks involved. Okay, so here’s where it starts getting really interesting.

Sensor Detection

I think the seaView software V3, it’s smart right from the get-go. Yeah, it is. You power it up and it just automatically finds and connects your Impact Subsea sensors. Scans all the comm ports, network connections, everything. You don’t have to do much initially. Exactly. It’s built for efficiency. Starting a single ISP360 profiler, just a double click. And that’s the sensor that maps the seafloor using sound pulses right on the ROV.

Default Settings

Precisely the ISP360, it creates these detailed 3D pictures underwater and by default it kicks off with a 90° scanning window. 90°. Yeah, like a quarter circle ahead. And the range is set usually about 10m out, but with a minimum range of just under half a meter. Perfect for getting up close. Definitely good for close-up inspection work.

Calibration

So, okay, first sensor is running. Easy enough. Now, what about adding that second profiler? Is it just another double click or is there more to it? Well, it’s not quite plug-and-play at that point. Connecting it is easy, yes, but the crucial part is calibration. Getting them to work together. Calibration. Think of it like getting both your eyes to focus on the same spot. You need to tell the software how they’re positioned relative to each other.

Makes sense. First, there’s the physical offset. The example we looked at mentioned, 1.46 m. You dial that in and visually the two images, the data from both profilers, they just sort of slide together so they overlap correctly. Exactly. So you get a combined picture.

Rotational Offset

But then there’s also the rotational offset. Rotational. What does that mean here? Well, maybe one sensor is tilted just slightly compared to the other. Even a tiny bit, say 3° like in the example. If you don’t correct for that, the data gets skewed, right? Your nice flat seabed might look well warped or worse if you’re laying pipe based on that data. A few degrees off could mean meters off course over distance. Wow. Okay. So, you adjust that rotation to make the seabed look flat in the combined data.

Precisely. And visually, the software helps. By default, one sensor shows up as red points, the other green. Helps you see what’s what, though you can change those colors. That attention to detail is pretty incredible. A few degrees makes that much difference. Sure. So, okay, our sensors are aligned like two eyes working together.

Optimizing Settings

What about the environment? Underwater can be noisy, right? Yeah. How do you get clean data? Good question. It’s all about optimizing the settings and filtering. You can tweak both profilers together using an ‘all’ setting or adjust them one by one.

Okay. So, the source material showed this test tank setup, a rectangular tank, and they had a plastic pipe in there, maybe 2m away, to simulate a pipeline. To focus just on that pipe, you’d adjust the ranges. Maybe set the minimum range to 1m and the maximum to say 2m. That tells the sonar, ignore stuff that’s too close or too far, just show me what’s in the zone. Concentrates the view.

Energy Threshold

Exactly. But then the really crucial bit, especially in noisy places like a test tank, is the energy threshold. Energy threshold. What’s that doing? Think of it like a filter for sound strength. It tells the software, look, ignore any really weak echoes, the faint stuff, that’s usually just noise, acoustic clutter, especially in a tank. Ah, so it cuts out the static pretty much. It ensures you only log the strong clear returns that are actually hitting your target like that pipe. So the data you save for the survey is much cleaner. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

Adjusting the Image

You can also view the raw acoustic image too, right? Tweak that. Oh yeah, absolutely. You can adjust, gain, contrast, change the color palette on the raw sonar image if you need to visually pick things out differently.

IS³ Signalling Scheme

Okay, this leads to maybe the biggest challenge I was thinking about. You’ve got two powerful sonars pinging away side by side. How on earth do they not just completely mess up each other’s signals? Acoustic interference seems inevitable, right? You’d think so, but this is where something really clever comes in. It’s fascinating, actually. What’s the secret?

The key is you set one profiler to mode A IS³ acoustics and the other one to mode B IS³ acoustics. Mode A and mode B. Yeah. Essentially, they use different signaling schemes, different ways of sending out and listening for their sound pulses. Like they’re talking on different radio channel. That’s a great analogy. They’re in the same space, but they’re not stepping on each other’s transmissions because the frequencies or patterns are distinct. So, no acoustic interference.

So, the software handles that switching or do you have to set it manually? You select mode A for one and mode B for the other. Often other acoustic settings can just be left on auto. The system’s pretty smart. But separating them into mode A and B is fundamental for dual operation. That is ingenious. Solves a huge potential problem. Absolutely. And once you’ve got all that dialed in, the offsets, the ranges, the threshold, the modes, the system just works.

Data Output

And the output, where does all this clean data go? It streams it out usually to a log file you can analyze later or it can send it directly to like a third party computer or another application. You just configure the comm the example use COM3 at a high speed 115200 baud and it sends the process data right over ready for immediate analysis for pipeline routes seabed maps whatever the mission requires precise object identification mapping you name it.

Conclusion

So, we’ve really seen the meticulous setup involved here, making two advanced sensors act like one seamless system. It really shows how crucial sophisticated software is to unlock what the hardware can do. It really does. And you know, this coordination, it raises a bigger question, I think. Yeah. Go on. How fundamental this idea is. You mean the coordinated interference-free operation, making sure sensors can talk without drowning each other out?

Exactly. It’s critical for subsea. Sure. But think about it everywhere else, right? Complex systems we rely on every day. Self-driving cars with multiple sensors, medical imaging. True. They all need multiple eyes or ears sharing the same space.

So the thought for you, our listener, is this. As we put more and more sensors into complex environments, what new challenges pop up? And what kinds of clever solutions like these acoustic modes will we need to invent next to ensure everything works together without getting tangled? Something to think about.

Find out more about the ISP360 Profiling Sonar.

Inversion Reset V3 – Transcript

Hi, I’m Ben Grant, Managing Director of Impact Subsea.

In this video, we’re going to show you how to set your Impact Subsea sensor to a known communications protocol and baud rate. In this example we’ll use the ISA500 altimeter as shown here, however the same process works for any Impact Subsea sensor.

To set your sensor to a known communications protocol, have the sensor on a bench with the connector pointing upwards.

Take your communications and power cable and connect it to the sensor. Once connected and once power is supplied, you want to rotate the sensor three times within the first 10 seconds. That will set the sensor to RS232 9600 baud.

If you have a sensor with V3 firmware or newer if you continue the rotations beyond three and go up to a minimum of six rotations, the sensor will be set to RS485 9600 baud at which point you can connect through your serial interface into your computer and find the sensor within the seaView software.

Once you’re into the seaView software you can configure the sensor to have any permanent communications protocol and baud rate that you require.

► OUR PRODUCTS ◄

► SUBSCRIBE ◄

► LETS CONNECT: ◄

👉 LinkedIn

👉 Twitter

👉 Facebook

👉 Instagram

► GET IN TOUCH ◄

EMAIL: info@impactsubsea.co.uk

PHONE: +44 (0)1224 460 850

Monday – Friday, 9AM – 5PM GMT

In this video, Ben Grant introduces the ISP360 profiling sonars incredible accuracy, precision and versatility.

Discover how this high performance profiling sonar can benefit your next project.

Keen to see more? Take a look at the ISP360 page

► OUR PRODUCTS ◄

► SUBSCRIBE ◄

► LETS CONNECT: ◄

👉 LinkedIn

👉 Twitter

👉 Facebook

👉 Instagram

► GET IN TOUCH ◄

EMAIL: info@impactsubsea.co.uk

PHONE: +44 (0)1224 460 850

Monday – Friday, 9AM – 5PM GMT