seaView Software V3 provides a cutting-edge user interface for the setup and operation of Impact Subsea sensors.

Transcript

Hi! I’m Ben and in this video we’ll be looking at the ISA500 application in seaView software V3.

When you first run seaView software you’ll be presented with this window here.  On the left hand side. You have a list of applications within seaView software. On the right hand side you have a list of all communication ports and network connections on your pc. When you first run seaView software it will automatically scan all communication ports at every known baud rate. It will then automatically detect any sensors connected to your computer.

In this example two sensors have been detected, one is the ISS360 Sonar and the other is the ISA500 Altimeter, as shown in the center of the screen. If you look at the icon for the ISA500 Altimeter, you’ll find you’re given a little bit more information such as the serial number of the sensor, the firmware version and also how it’s connected to the software. In this particular example we can see it’s connected via COM Port 5 at a baud rate of 115,200. If you double click on the ISA500 icon you’ll be taken into the ISA500 application.

seaView Software Application main screen

Now in the application, the top left hand corner shows the distance reading being reported by the ISA500. Every time the sensor pings you will see a green flash of this light here and a distance reading reported. Below the distance reading you also get an energy and correlation value. Also reported is the temperature of the ISA500 internal electronics and if you have an ISA500 with integrated Heading, Pitch and Roll, you’ll also get Heading, Pitch and Roll readings with a little 3D model of the sensor to show you how it’s orientated at any one time.   

Acoustics settings

In the middle of the screen you’ve got a graph showing distance measurements over time. The left hand side of the screen you have a number of icons. Now if we start with the top icon, this is the ISA500 settings, so if you enter the settings you’ll be presented with a window like this. The first settings window is all to do with the ISA500 Acoustics.  

The ISA500 is a highly configurable altimeter. You can configure many parameters; for example you can change the detection mode you can operate in first detect, strongest or seabed tracking. First detection mode is ideal if you’re working in a confined space where there’s a lot of multi-path, multi-echo capability such as inside a tank. Strongest echo is better for open water activity and if you’re wanting to track the seabed then there’s a seabed tracking option as well.

You can also enable and disable tilt correction, so if you have an ISA500 with integrated AHRS, enabling tilt correction will automatically convert slant ranges into actual altitude so it’ll correct for pitch and roll of your vehicle and give you a more stable altitude reading. You can disable this if you wish and just have pure range readings from the sensor.

You can then configure minimum and maximum ranges, so for your minimum range anything below the set value will never be detected by the ISA500 and your maximum range anything above that value will never be detected by the ISA500 so you can basically gate the ranges that you’re wanting the sensor to look over.  

You can also set the frequency. The ISA500 is a broadband altimeter so you can run it anywhere from 400 to 600kHz. You can set the speed of sound to give you an accurate distance reading, you can set the pulse length and the pulse amplitude. You can also put in any distance offsets as required. Moving on to the next settings window the analogue output.

Analogue output

The ISA500 can provide you a serial ASCII output but it can also provide you a scaled output and it can provide a scaled current or it can provide a scaled voltage and you can set up the scaling. So you can set up the start and stop voltages and your minimum and maximum ranges to scale that over.

Echoes

The next setting option is your multiecho setup and this is the number of echoes to be reported on from a single ping. Most applications the ISA500 is used just to give a single range reading but it can also give you multiple range readings from a single ping and you can set how many range readings you want the sensor to report on.

Connection

The next option is your connection so in this window here you can select the serial mode which  can be RS232, RS485 or RS485 terminated. You can also set the required baud rate together with the word length, parity and the number of stop bits required.

Output string

The next option is the output string. This is the output string for the distance reading. There’s a number of pre-configured strings and all of which are detailed in the ISA500 manual so you’ve got a number of Impact Subsea strings and you have a number of third-party strings to allow the ISA500 to emulate other altimeters in the market. If the particular string you require is not there you also have the custom button which allows you to create your own ASCII output string in the exact format which you require.

You can also set up in this window what the ISA500 should do if no returns are received whether it outputs a zero reading or a maximum reading and you can also tell it how many times you want it to ping an output to reading anywhere from well a fraction of a second up to up to 100Hz.

You can also set up the interrogation method so if you want to interrogate the ISA500 and command it to ping you can enable that and also set the parameter for it to respond to. You can also select interrogate via TTL if you want to trigger it via TTL and you can select whether it’s the falling edge or the rising edge of the TTL pulse which it triggers on.

AHRS settings

Then if you have an ISA500 which has integrated AHRS you’ll have the AHRS settings option. In here you can configure everything to do with the Heading Pitch and Roll. To start off with you can select the orientation, by default it’s assumed that the ISA500 has the connector pointing upwards and the transducer pointing downwards, however you can change it to be inverted or pitched over or rolled over. And these just set the reference point for your your Pitch, Roll and Heading to make sure you get accurate readings.  

Once installed on the vehicle if there’s any inaccuracies and how it’s been installed you can apply minor offsets to the heading pitch and roll. You can also apply a magnetic declination offset enable inertial mode, calibrate the magnetometers and set up your turns counter for the sensor as well.

AHRS output string

The last option to look at here is your AHRS output so this configures the ASCII output string for the heading pitch and roll side of things. And as before the number of Impact Subsea strings and there’s a number of industry standard strings as well. All of which are documented in the ISA500 manual and again as before if there’s a string you require which isn’t there or you want a slightly different string you have the custom option to go in edit a string or create an entirely new string to meet exactly what you require.

Like the altitude or range output you can select how many times per second the string is output. You can also enable interrogation and set up the parameter for the ISA500 to respond to and you can also have the output output on a TTL interrogation as well so that’s all the core ISA500 settings so if we return to the main screen.

If we look at the left hand side again there’s a ping button so you can manually trigger a ping from the sensor and there’s also a ping rate and this sets the ping rate of the sensor when it’s connected to the seaview software so it’s currently set to 1Hz.

We can increase it to 5Hz or 10Hz or we can set the sensor to run at maximum rate. If we set to maximum it’ll basically ping as fast as it can given your minimum maximum range setting. And as we change the ping rate you can see that green light flashes at the designated rate and that basically flashes once per ping on the sensor.

Record log file

At any time you can enable a log file by clicking here and it will record all the ISA500 readings to a log file and time stamp them. You can clear the graph data here if you want to start afresh. You’ve got display options so you can set exactly which parameters you want to be showing on screen. For example you could turn off the temperature we turn off the heading pitch and roll so you’ve just got altitude in the little 3D model for the ISA500, or you can enable all those back on again. Turn on the turns counter, so it will show you the number of turns the ISA500 has made.

Multi-echo output

And the last item I’ll show you here is the multi-echo output capability. If you click show multi-echo it’ll bring up another graph at the bottom of the screen. You can click and make this graph a bit larger and this graph will essentially show you every single return that ISA500 sees from a single pulse being sent out. It gives you a good appreciation of exactly the acoustic environment in which ISA500 finds itself. Or if you want to make multiple measurements to different targets that fall within the six degree conical beam from the ISA500, this is a good way to do it.

Multi-echo output

And the last item I’ll show you here is the multi-echo output capability. If you click show multi-echo it’ll bring up another graph at the bottom of the screen. You can click and make this graph a bit larger and this graph will essentially show you every single return that ISA500 sees from a single pulse being sent out. It gives you a good appreciation of exactly the acoustic environment in which ISA500 finds itself. Or if you want to make multiple measurements to different targets that fall within the six degree conical beam from the ISA500, this is a good way to do it.

ECHOGRAM

Since the above video was created, a new feature was added to seaView. For ISA500 sensors with ECHOGRAM enabled, the ECHOGRAM graph can be shown.

This provides full sonar backscatter data (up to 2,000 samples per ping). A full technical overview of ECHOGRAM can be found here.

Graph options

One other item to consider, on the right hand side of the screen we have a graph options button and this allows you to edit the graph display so you can turn off the fill and you can have it draw points for every ping, can turn off draw lines you can basically alter things to get the exact graph that you want to have on screen.

That’s the ISA500 application in seaView Software V3, if you have any questions regarding this please do not hesitate to contact us at support@impactsubsea.co.uk

Take a look at the ISA500 Product Page: ISA500 Altimeter

Learn more about how our altimeter works in this in-depth technical guide

Watch seaView Software overviews on our other sensors: YouTube playlist

seaView V3 provides a cutting-edge user interface for the setup and operation of Impact Subsea sensors including our AUV/ROV Sonar.

AUV/ROV Sonar – seaView Software Introduction

Transcript

Hi! I’m Ben and in this video we’re looking at the ISS360 AUV/ROV Sonar, software application in seaView V3.

When you first run seaView V3 you’ll be presented with this screen here. On the left hand side you have a list of the applications in seaView on the right hand side you have a list of all the communication ports on your computer and in the middle you have a list of any sensors that have been detected.

When seaView is first run it will automatically scan every com port at every known baud rate and will also scan your network to see if there’s any Impact Subsea sensors connected. In this instance it has detected two sensors – we have an ISA500 altimeter and also the ISS360 AUV/ROV Sonar.

The icon for each of these gives a little more detail about the connected sensors for example on the ISS360 AUV/ROV Sonar we can see the serial number the firmware version and also how it’s been connected in this instance we can see it’s been connected over the network and it’s displaying the IP address of the sonar.

Double-clicking on the sonar icon will take you into the ROV sonar app and the sonar will automatically start to scan. In this example we have a sonar running in the Impact Subsea test tank which is roughly a two meter diameter circular test tank and we can see that on screen showing up there.

In the middle of the screen we have the main sonar display on the right hand side, if you have a sonar with integrated pitch and roll, you get the pitch and roll readings and you also get a little graphic of the sonar showing any motion that is experiencing.

We also have a colour chart on the left hand side here so you can change the the colour palette of the sonar to suit your own preference. We typically use this kind of multicolour going from black to blue to green to yellow to red. This bar you can also lift up the lower red rectangle and this will remove all the weaker returns from the display as I move it up you can see only the stronger returns are left on the screen.

As I move it down it’ll start to include the weaker returns as well. Pushing it all the way to bottom means that all the returns will be shown on screen. There’s also a little red rectangle at the top of this this bar if you pull that down it’ll compress the bar and increase the contrast on the screen so pulling it down really far will make a very noisy solar image and really show all the strong returns very vividly and moving it up will decrease the contrast and just show it in its more normal state.

Down at the bottom of the screen we have a gain bar which is currently set to 35. If you increase that it’ll apply more software again to the sonar imagery if you decrease it it’ll remove the gain and essentially you want to set that to a level where you see everything you want to see and you remove any excess noise from the imagery.

The next item down the bottom of the screen is your range setting so you can decrease this to look closer in, down to one meter or you can increase this look further out anywhere up to 100 meters. As we’re working in a two meter tank we’ll just set it down to two meters.

You then have a selector which runs speed to quality and this sets the step size of the ISS360 AUV/ROV Sonar. If we set it to speed the sonar will take a very large step size between pings it will scan round very quickly if we move this bar more towards quality we slowly reduce the step size so it takes finer and finer steps and gives you a finer and finer resolution.

This comes with a trade-off in scanning speed so depending on your application you might want to set it to scan very quickly if you’re moving quickly or navigating underwater and if you get up to a target and you want to identify that target you can move this up to higher quality and get a higher resolution and better understanding of what you’re seeing.

AUV/ROV Sonar Acoustics setup

That’s the basic AUV/ROV Sonar interface, now to go through some of the more advanced features in the top left-hand corner we have a settings button and if you click on settings you’ll be presented with this screen here.

The first settings tab which pops up is your acoustic parameters. Now by default we leave this set to auto. This means as you adjust the range the sonar will automatically update the acoustic parameters to give you the best range and resolution capabilities.

If you don’t want to use this auto feature you can deselect this box and you can edit the start and end frequencies for doing a CHIRP or you could make them both the same if you want to do a continuous wave transmission from the sonar.

You can select the pulse length and also the pulse amplitude but for the majority of applications we recommend this is left to auto and just leave the sonar to determine the best settings for your range setting. You can also set the speed of sound here and you can also invert the sonar image here.

This is quite useful by default the sonar is intended to be run with the black boot end upwards and the connector downwards. If you’re running it the other way up so the boot end down, connector up, click the ‘Invert Sonar Image’ and it’ll just make sure that your your lefts and rights are correct on screen.

AUV/ROV Sonar – Connection

The next setting option we have is your connection, so here you can change the serial mode from RS232 to RS485 or RS485 Terminated and you can also select the baud rate. You can also use this window to set up your your network properties of your IP address, netmask and gateway. You can also enable DHCP if you require this.

Lastly if you have an AUV/ROV Sonar with ARS you’ll have the AHRS settings page. In here you can tell the sonar how it’s been mounted whether it’s the default value whether it’s inverted, whether it’s on its side and this will just ensure that your pitch and roll readings are all accurately referenced you can also input any minor offsets to account for installation error of the sonar.

You can also do a calibration of the magnetometer and select which axis the turns counter counts around whether it’s your Heading your Pitch or your Roll. Once you’ve changed any settings in here as soon as you click the green tick ‘Ok’ button these will be saved to the sonar firmware and those settings will be saved forever more regardless of power cycles.

The only time they’ll get changed is when you go back into seaView, connect to the sonar, make a change and click ‘Ok’ again. If you don’t want to apply the the changes you’ve made just click the the ‘Cancel’ button.

AUV/ROV Sonar – Bins and sector scan

Going back to the other options on the left hand side one is your bins and sector. Bins set to auto basically means it will take a number of samples in each ping to fill every single pixel on screen.

You can then set the AUV/ROV Sonar to a full 360 or you can set it to do a sector scan. Now setting it to a sector scan is very useful if you’re using it on an ROV and you want to look dead ahead or to the side or behind the vehicle and only update that one window.

You can also set the start and stop points of that window so you can narrow it down, you can make it wider it’s totally up to you to how you set that window.

You can also enable flyback. Now if you click on flyback the sonar will scan from the left to the right and then it’ll very quickly fly back scan from the left to the right. If you disable flyback it’ll scan from the left to the right and then it’ll scan from the right to the left so it’s really your preference and how you want the sonar to scan.

At any point you can click the full 360 and we’ll go back to doing a full 360 scan. At any point you can pause the sonar and start the sonar going again. You can reverse the direction of the scan using this button; this is quite useful if you see something moving in the water and you just want to temporarily scan back and forth across that target to track it or see what’s happening there.

AUV/ROV Sonar – Record a log file

You can record a log file if you want to record everything that’s happening for playback later on. You can open it using this button at any point you can clear the screen just to get rid of the historic data and it will start updating the screen again.

You also have a display button and this button can be used to turn on and off different features of the display for example we can turn off the range from the display, you can even turn off the scan line, the grid etc and you can turn things back on like heading around the sensor. You’ve got quite a few few options there.

You also have a reset view here so if you’ve used the mouse or used the zoom buttons here to zoom in and move around the screen to see something more detail you can use this reset button here to put it back to default. You can zoom in zoom out, you can use this feature here to take measurements, so you just click it and then you just click and drag on screen you take any measurements of the sonar imagery.

If you want to measure a target to understand it’s size it’s nice and quick and easy to do that. Again clicking the measurement will turn that off again.

There’s also a feature to add markers on the screen so if you see something of interest you can click on screen add a marker to it using the left mouse button and clicking the right mouse button will take that marker away. You can add multiple markers on screen if you wanted to highlight something to another user or just have them there to reference

That’s the ISS360 application in seaView Software V3, if you have any questions regarding this please do not hesitate to contact us at support@impactsubsea.co.uk

Learn more about how our ROV sonar works in this in-depth technical guide

Take a look at the ISS360 Product Page: ISS360 Imaging Sonar

Watch seaView Software overviews on our other sensors: YouTube playlist

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

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seaView V3 provides a cutting-edge user interface for the setup and operation of Impact Subsea sensors. The launch of seaView V3 is accompanied by the release of a third generation of sensor firmware.

ISFMD seaView overview – Transcript

Hi I’m Ben and in this video we’re looking at the Impact Subsea Flooded Member Detection System and seaView V3.

Once you’ve installed seaView V3 either by downloading it from our website or from the USB drive supplied with the ISFMD System you’ll have the seaView icon on your desktop.

If you run seaView you’ll be presented with this screen here. Now on the left hand side we have a list of all applications within seaView. In the middle of the screen we have a list of any sensors that have been detected by seaView. On the right hand side we have a list of any communication ports on your pc.

When seaView is first run it will automatically scan all communication ports, at every known baud rate and pick up any sensors connected to your computer. In this example here, the software has picked up an Impact Subsea ISS360 sonar and also the ISA500 FMD probe.

Installing the ISFMD licence

For the purposes of flooded member detection we want to click on the ISA500 probe and we want to click on the ISFMD app in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. When you do this, you’ll be presented with this screen here.

Initial running you’ll have a warning pop-up which basically states that this application requires a license in order to be operated. You can install your license either by clicking on the warning or by clicking on the settings button in the top right hand corner of the screen.

If we click on the warning that’ll take us to the installation page for any licenses. The license file will be provided on the USB drive which came with the system so if you insert the drive and click browse you’ll be able to find the file.

Click open and the file will automatically be installed. Once you click close that’s the license installed in seaView and you won’t ever have to do this again, it’s a one-time operation. Now we’ve done that, the warnings disappeared and the system is now ready to be used.

Application main screen

To talk through the application itself; on the top left hand corner we have a little 3D model of the ISFMD probe. If I take the ISA500 ISFMD probe and move it around you can see on screen it moves in real time, as I move the probe.

This is really useful for whoever is operating the software, they can see exactly how the the probe is being held, either by the ROV or by the diver. Thanks to the 3D model, we have a little visual graphic of the ISA500 probe, with the ping button below it.

In this graphic here the probe is shown pushed up against a member. We’ve got a cross cut of the member which shows the the green acoustic beam going from the ISA500 probe, through the member and hitting the the back wall of the member.

We also have a blue box around the back wall of the member and this is the area in which the system will be looking for any returns which would suggest a flooded member. On the right hand side it gives you an estimated fill which will either be dry, part filled or flooded.

The lower, left-hand corner we have a list of members which we’re going to test. In the middle of the screen we have the details of the member which is currently under test and the lower right hand side we have a list of all the readings we’ve taken so far.

Set up first member

The first thing to do is to set up the first member so we’ll give it a name and we’ll just call this test member.

The next thing to do is to ensure that the diameter of the member has been correctly entered into the software. This is the most critical item to enter into the software and make sure you’ve got it correct. In this example we’ve got a relatively small diameter member so we’ll set it’s diameter as 0.21 meters / 21 centimeters.

It’s important to set the correct diameter or a reasonably close approximation of the diameter as this sets the area in which the software will look for a return which would suggest the member is flooded or dry. Next is to set up the transmit power and this is just the the amplitude of the transmitted pulse from the ISA500 probe. This is quite a small member diameter we’re going to drop that transmit power down to 20 percent.

Next you can set the speed of sound. By default this is the speed of sound in water. If you suspect the member under test is going to be filled with something else, such as an hydrocarbon which may have a different speed of sound you can enter in the expected speed of sound there.

You can then set up the member angle. You can set up the length of the member and you can also set up the end depth of the member so you get a visual representation of the member under test.

At this point we’ve set up the member, it’s all correct, it’s good to go. We can go ahead and place the ISA500 probe up against the member itself. When you do this, you want to make sure the probe is touching the member and you want to make sure that any spot cleaning has been carried out beforehand so the member surface is clean and you get a good contact with the probe. If we move the probe into position and click ‘Ping’.

In this example we’ve got a flooded member; I’ve clicked ‘Ping’, the sound has gone from the ISA500 probe into the member, it’s hit the back wall and it’s been reflected back again and detected by the ISA500. We can see the returning echo there, shown on screen. We can see the software is basically highlighting it’s a flooded member.

Add Readings

I’ll return it 0.23 meters and at this point if we’re happy with that reading we can click ‘Add Reading’ so it’ll save the reading. At this point we can say how far along the member it was. We can tell the position that we took that reading at so it could be 0 to 360 degrees around the pipe. Let’s say it was at 45 degrees.

We can then move the probe along to another part of the pipe and take another reading. We still get a flooded example, we can add this reading here. Say this is at two meters along the pipe, again 45 degrees. You can basically work your way along the the member, taking as many readings as you require.

If we move the probe to a section of the pipe where it’s not flooded, where it’s dry. We click ‘Ping’ now, we get no return coming back to the probe and the software is estimating that this is a dry section, it’s not heard any return back so it’s dry. At this point we can click ‘Add Reading’. State where along the pipe it was and we can see that being added to the pipe or the member mimic there. You can see we’ve got a couple of flooded readings and we’ve got one dry reading at the top.

Complete ISFMD test

Once you’ve conducted all the tests you’ll want to conduct on the member, you can click the ‘Test Complete’ button and that just marks it as complete there and also marks as complete in the members list. You can also add in any notes. These notes will just be stored in the final report so if there’s any observations or anything you want to note for anyone else to know, it’s a useful place to note them.

We can then go and add another member and we can set up that member’s name and we can set the diameter of that member along with the transmit power required etc. Then we can go through the tests again, add all the readings want to read and then complete the member. You can keep adding members manually, one at a time, if you want and just do that as you go.

Preconfigure Members

The other option is, prior to actually commencing an offshore project, you can add in a whole lot of members and you can pre-configure every single member and if you click this ‘save button’ on the left hand side of the screen it’ll basically save that list of members, all their diameters, transmit powers, their names etc. So you’ve got a fully populated list and once you get offshore you can just go and load the member list back in.

If I go and load a member list in just now, one that I created earlier, it goes to desktop, remember list so it’s loaded in a list of about six members that I’ve pre-configured there. It’s got the member names and you can skip through them and you can see the settings change for each one. That’s just a very quick way to pre-configure everything so once you actually get to the project you can quickly just work through members one by one and you’re not having to set up each one individually as you go.

ISFMD Reports

Once you’ve run through all your members and you’re happy with all your readings, they’re all complete, you can click the ‘report button’ here and clicking the report button will save all readings to an html file which you can then open and view in any browser.

To give you an example, there’s a test here which I did earlier. If I open the html file you can see the report, the date and then it’ll basically list all the members you’ve tested along with the member configuration and any readings that were there when the member was tested.

That’s the ISFMD application in seaView Software V3, if you have any questions regarding this please do not hesitate to contact us at support@impactsubsea.co.uk

Take a look at the ISFMD Product Page: ISFMD Flooded Member Detection

Watch seaView Software overviews on our other sensors: YouTube playlist

seaView V3 provides a cutting-edge user interface for the setup and operation of Impact Subsea sensors including our underwater AHRS.

Underwater AHRS – seaView Software Introduction

Transcript

Hi! I’m Ben and in this video we’re going to look at the ISM3D application in seaView V3.

When you first run seaView you’ll be presented with this window here. On the left hand side of the window we have a list of applications within seaView. On the right hand side of the window we have a list of all the communication ports on your computer and network connections.

In the middle of the screen are any devices or sensors that have been automatically detected. When seaView is first run it scans every com port, at every known baud rate, and your network connections, to find any Impact Subsea sensors that may be connected. This way they automatically show up.

In this instance here we have two sensors connected. We have the ISS360 sonar and the ISM3D sensor. If you look at the icon for the ISM3D you can see you get a number of extra bits of information such as the serial number, the firmware version and also how it’s connected. In this case we can see it’s connected via com port 5 at 9600 baud.

ISM3D application main screen

Double clicking on the ISM3D icon will take you into the ISM3D app. When you first enter the app you’ll find a display same as this. In the top left hand corner you’ve got your Heading and then you’ve got your Pitch and your Roll and you have a little graphic of the ISM3D.

In this instance here I’ve got the sensor with me here. You can see as I rotate it you can see the heading change and if I pitch it and if I roll it and pitch it you can see all the the values change there and the 3D model updates in real time to give you a good indication just, at a glance, how the sensor is sitting.

In the middle of the screen we have a graph of Heading, Pitch and Roll updating over time so you can see any movements in the centre and how it’s graphed.

Connection settings

On the left hand side of the screen we have a number of buttons the top one being the settings button if you click on that it’ll bring up the ISM3D settings page and the first page you’re taken to is the Connection page from here you can set the serial communications mode so this can be RS232, RS485 or RS485 terminated and you can set the baud rate of the sensor. You can also set the word length, parity and the number of stop bits.

Setup window

Moving on to the next window, the setup window, this contains most of the settings for configuring the Heading, Pitch and Roll side of the sensor. Initially you can select the orientation, so the default orientation is to have the sensor mounted like this with the connector facing upwards.

You can also set it to be inverted or you can set it to be pitched or rolled over to suit how you’ve installed it on your vehicle. You can also input minor offsets on the Heading, Pitch and Roll to account for any inaccuracies in mounting on the vehicle. You can also set up any magnetic declination offsets and you can enable or disable inertial mode. You can calibrate the magnetometers and you can set up your turns counter from this window.

Output string

The last tab in the settings is the output string. When not running into the seaView software you can select the output string that the sensor should output. This is the ASCII string. There’s a number of Impact Subsea strings which are detailed in the ISM3D manual and there’s also a number of other industry standard strings allowing the ISM3D to emulate pretty much any other Underwater AHRS sensor in the market.

If you require a string which is not in there already you have the option to implement a custom string, where you can create a new string, copy a string and edit it, basically create an output string to exactly meet your requirements.

You can then enable the output string and define how many times per second it should be output and you can also enable the interrogation string and this is basically if you want to command an output string from the ISM3D.

When you click the green tick ‘Ok’ button all these settings will be saved to the ISM3D firmware and they will remain there forevermore regardless of power cycling until you next go into seaView and connect to the ISM3D and make another settings change. If you don’t want to apply any of the settings changes that you’ve made just click the ‘Cancel’ button.

Recording Underwater AHRS Readings

Going back to the main screen again we’ve covered the settings and the next one is record so if you click this button it’ll record and time stamp all of the readings from the ISM3D to a csv file and there’s also a clear graph button if you click this it basically wipes the graph and it’ll start updating again.

Underwater AHRS Display options

There’s also display options button and if you click this you can decide what you want to have on screen at any one time. For example you could turn off the graph, you could turn off the 3D model, so you just get Heading, Pitch and Roll, or you could turn them back on. You could also enable the turns counter and that will count the number of turns around whichever axis
you’ve defined – Heading, Pitch or Roll.

Graph options

One other thing I’ll show you, here on the right hand side of the screen you’ve got a graph option button. If you click that you can change a number of display properties of the graph on the screen and you can turn off the fill, you can invert x or y axis, you can have points for every single reading that it’s taken, basically set up a display to match what you’d like to see on screen.

That’s the ISM3D application in seaView Software V3, if you have any questions regarding this please do not hesitate to contact us at support@impactsubsea.co.uk

Take a look at the ISM3D Product Page: ISM3D Underwater AHRS

Watch seaView Software overviews on our other sensors: YouTube playlist

seaView V3 provides a cutting-edge user interface for the setup and operation of Impact Subsea sensors including our ISD4000 Underwater Depth Sensor.

Transcript

Hi! I’m Ben and in this video we’ll be looking at the ISD4000 Underwater Depth Sensor application in seaView V3. When you first run seaView V3 you’ll be presented with this screen here. On the left hand side you have a list of applications within seaView. On the right hand side you have a list of all communication ports on your computer and any network connections. 

When you first run seaView, seaView will scan all communication ports and network connections to search for any Impact Subsea sensors. Any sensors detected are then shown in the middle of the screen here under devices. In this example here, an ISS360 sonar has been detected and also an ISD4000 Depth and Temperature sensor.  If you look at the icon for the ISD4000 you can see we’re presented with some additional information such as the serial number of the sensor connected, the firmware version of that sensor and also how it’s connected to seaView. In this example we can see it’s connected via com port 5 and is connected at a baud rate of 115,200 baud.  

ISD4000 Underwater Depth Sensor Application main screen

If you double click on the ISD4000 icon you’ll be taken into the main application. Once into the application you’ll find you’ve got depth measured and the depth reading top left hand corner and below the depth reading is the raw pressure reading from the sensor.  

We then also have temperature and if you have an ISD4000 with integrated Heading, Pitch and Roll you also have heading pitch and roll and a little 3D model of the sensor all of which update in real time. If we take a sensor if we move it around you can see the Heading changes as it rotates and the Roll and the Pitch change as we move the sensor the little 3D model of the sensor updates in real time just to provide you a kind of ‘at a glance’ indication of how the sensor is sitting.

In the middle of the screen we have a graph which is depth over time, plotted away there.

ISD4000 Underwater Depth Sensor App Setup

If we look at the top left hand side of the screen the first button down is your settings button. If you click on this you’ll be taken into the the main setup page. From here the initial setup page you can enter in the latitude, of your area of operation, it’s useful to enter this as it’ll be taken into account when doing the pressure to depth conversion as it’ll take into account the local gravity in the area you’re working in.

You can apply any depth offsets, any pressure offset, you can tear the sensor immediately. If you click the ‘Tare Now’ and then click the ‘Ok’ button it basically zeros the depth and you can see the depth has been zeroed in the top left hand corner. If we go back into the settings again, you can also apply a filter to the pressure, this is an averaging filter.

Calibration

You can also from this window carry out a pressure calibration and a temperature calibration. To carry out a pressure calibration you’ll need a high accuracy atmospheric pressure sensor combined with a dead weight tester and associated weights. For the temperature calibration you’ll need a number of temperature baths each at a set temperature.

Connection

The next settings window to go into is the ‘Connection’ window. From here you can set the serial communications mode of the sensor which can be RS232, RS485 or RS485 Terminated and you can also set the baud rate required on the sensor together with the word length, parity and number of stop bits.

ISD4000 Underwater Depth Sensor Output string

This next window allows you to set up the output string from the ISD4000. This is the output string for the depth and pressure. There’s a number of standard Impact Subsea strings and also number of strings from other sensors as well. These are all documented fully in the ISD4000 manual. 

If there’s a string you require which isn’t present you can use the custom button to either edit a string or add an entirely new ASCII output string to your own configuration. This makes ISD4000 really simple and really easy to integrate with third-party systems.

In the same window you can also set up how many times per second to output the string and you can also set up any interrogation strings you require, tare strings and un-tare strings.  

You can set exactly the parameter that you want the ISD4000 to respond to for each of these interrogation commands.

AHRS settings

If you have an ISD4000 with integrated AHRS, providing Heading, Pitch and Roll, you’ll also have AHRS settings and AHRS output. If you click on the AHRS settings tab, from here you can set up everything to do with Heading, Pitch and Roll. You can initially set the orientation so the default is connector facing upwards pressure port facing downwards. We can set it to be inverted or you can set any offsets on the Roll or the Pitch. And this will essentially provide you with an accurate reference point for your Pitch and Roll and Heading readings.  

Once installed on the vehicle you can also make any minor adjustments to the Heading, Pitch and Roll values to account for minor inaccuracies in installation. You can also set up a magnetic declination 
offset, turn initial mode on and off, calibrate your magnetometers and configure your turns counter from this window. 

AHRS output string

If we look at the AHRS output from here you can select a number of Impact Subsea strings or again a number of industry standard strings or like with the Pressure and Depth output string you can also create your own custom string. From here you can either edit one of the standard strings or you can create an entirely new string to suit your application. And again you can select the the rate at which you want the string to be output;  or if you want to interrogate string you can set up a interrogation value for it.

ISD4000 Underwater Depth Sensor Record log file

Once you’ve finished configuring the ISD4000 Underwater Depth Sensor, clicking the green tick ‘Ok’ button will save all the settings to the firmware and they will remain there until the sensor is next connected to seaView and the settings are changed again, regardless of power cycles.

Going back to the main screen. Looking on the left hand side you can record a csv file which will give you all the readings from the ISD4000 Underwater Depth Sensor, saved into a log file, along with a timestamp and in terms of the graph you can clear the graph and you can also set up display options.

ISD4000 Underwater Depth Sensor Display options

You can set what you want to have displayed on screen. For example you could turn off the Temperature, the Pitch, Roll and Heading and just have the Depth and Pressure, a little 3D model of the depth sensor. Or you can turn these back 
on, or maybe with the turns counter as well, really just to suit your application setup.

That’s the ISD4000 application in seaView Software V3, if you have any questions regarding this please do not hesitate to contact us at support@impactsubsea.co.uk

Take a look at the ISD4000 Underwater Depth Sensor Product Page: ISD4000 Depth Sensor

Watch seaView Software overviews on our other sensors: YouTube playlist

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.

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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

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AUV / ROV Sensor Software – seaView Live Question & Answer Session.

Transcript

Hi and welcome to this week’s YouTube session from Impact Subsea. I’m Ben Grant Managing Director of Impact Subsea and as always I’ll be answering your questions regarding our underwater sensors and software, live here on YouTube.

Over the past few weeks we’ve looked at a number of different Impact Subsea sensors. We’ve looked at our altimeters, depth sensors all the way to our sonars. We’ve basically covered every single piece of hardware that Impact Subsea produces.

AUV / ROV Sensor Software – seaView Software Overview

What we haven’t covered however is our AUV / ROV Sensor Software, seaView. I’ve got that running behind me today and shown on this large screen here. seaView is a single piece of software which is used with all of our sensors and it’s used to set up the sensor, calibrate the sensor, show all the live data from the sensor and also log data to be viewed again later or processed by third-party software.

So a quick overview of the AUV / ROV Sensor Software, seaView itself; running behind me here is seaView V3 which is our latest version of seaView. It’s available to download from our website free of charge if you want to download it and check it out.

When you first run seaView you’ll be presented with this screen here. On the right hand side you have a list of all the communication ports on your PC, all the serial comm. ports and also any network ports. On this computer here we can see we’ve got a local area network showing up at the top there and we’ve got a number of comm. ports that have been detected by the software as well.

When seaView is first run, it finds all the comm. ports and your network port and it will scan all of these at every known baud rate to detect any Impact Subsea sensors that are connected. When you run the software, assuming all your sensors are physically connected up, powered on, it will automatically show up in the middle of the screen here.

If you’ve run the software and then connected sensors later on there’s a little search button up here, it’s a little magnifying glass. You click that, it’ll re-scan all the comm. ports at every known baud rate and also your network as well, to find any sensors. All your comm. ports and network ports are shown down the side there.

Any sensors have been detected by the software shown in the middle and on the left hand side here, any applications which are installed in the software are shown there. We basically have an application for every single sensor we have. An application for the altimeter, depth sensor, the attitude, heading reference system, sonars and also our flooded member detection system.

In this example here we fired up the AUV / ROV Sensor Software, seaView and it’s detected a whole lot of different sensors on the network and connected via comm. ports.

We’ve got four depth sensors showing up there and we’ve got an altimeter and we also have a sonar connected and we also have a Serial Over Lan which is an internal Impact Subsea product which we use just to put all of our serial devices over our network. It can be detected by any computer connected to the local network.

As soon as you want to use any device, for example; you wanted to use the altimeter, you simply double click on that icon and it’ll automatically run the altimeter application. We’ve got our altitude shown here, temperature, heading, pitch and roll.

A little graphic of the altimeter just to show you how it’s physically orientated at the particular point in time. Down below we’ve got a graph which shows history so you’re getting every ping reading, it’s just graphed over time.

From this app you can view all the data live, you can log data so if you want to save data to a CSV file or output it on a comm. port to another computer, you can do that from here. You can also set up your altimeter so you can set up all the acoustic side of things.

On the ISA500 range of altimeters everything from your minimum range to your maximum range, your detection mode for the returning echo and you can set up all the outputs of the sensor as well. If you wanted an analog output such as a scaled voltage you can set it up here. You can set up your comms, you can change the output from 232 to 485 and set the baud rate and you can set up the output string from the altimeter itself.

There’s a whole lot of predefined industry standard strings that you can set or you can go into custom and you can create your own output string which can then be saved into the altimeter. All these settings, once you click the OK button they’re saved into the firmware of the sensor and so in this case the altimeter.

If you then set it up to output a set string and once you disconnect the AUV / ROV Sensor Software, seaView the altimeter should output that ASCII string whichever one you’ve defined here, at whatever rate you define here as well.

That’s the altimeter running, at any point we can jump back into the home page and see other sensors connected and we can bring up our sonar for example. The sonar scanning away there.

All these sensors are just in the Impact Subsea test tank which is located over here. As you’ve probably seen in previous videos, it’s a circular tank, it’s on the sonar image, we’re getting a circular image there. The altimeter is installed quite close to the surface of the tank so just reading about 70 centimeter distance from the surface down to the bottom of the tank.

Looking at other sensors as well you can basically add as many sensors as you want. For example, a depth sensor, that’s where the depth sensors come in there. All these windows, you can manually move them around, resize them to suit your requirements. Any of the windows you can undock so you can then reposition them so you can very quickly create a custom user interface there to suit the requirements of your projects.

If you’re working on ROV you can set it up so maybe the sonar is the main item on display with all your other sensors around it; your depth sensor, altimeter, heading sensor etc.

If you don’t want them all sitting side by side you can always put them into a tabs formation and then you can just click through all sensors at the top of the screen so you’ve got one tab per sensor but if you want to view a lot of data all at once then the auto arrangement of them all together is probably the best choice.

That’s a very quick overview of the AUV / ROV Sensor Software, seaView. On our YouTube page you’ll find those videos for every single application and where I go into a lot more detail. We tend to spend about 10 minutes per application, looking at everything through the altimeter, everything to do with depth sensor etc. If it’s a particular application that you’re really interested in have a quick look on our YouTube page and you’ll find them there.

You’ll also find them on our website under any of the product sections. The altimeter page has all the altimeter videos. Depth sensor pages has all the depth sensor videos etc.

Can I run AUV / ROV Sensor Software – seaView on a 32 bit computer?

There’s some of the common questions that we get asked about seaView is; “Can I run seaView on a 32-bit computer?” The answer is yes, yes you can. We have two versions of seaView V3 we have a 32-bit release and a 64-bit release.

You can download them from our website on the seaView page and both are free of charge and they will run on any Windows 7, 8, 10 or 11 PC.

What OS does AUV / ROV Sensor Software – seaView support?

That’s also another question often asked is; “What operating system does seaView support?” Right now it’s all windows based.

Can I output data from seaView to a third party computer/survey package?

Another question we sometimes get asked is; “Can I output data from seaView to third-party survey package?” The answer is yes, yes you can. Any of the sensors can be set up to take the data into seaView initially, display it on the screen, then output it via another comm. port. You can feed it into a third-party software package for further processing or viewing.

Can I have a price for the AUV / ROV Sensor Software – seaView?

Another question that we sometimes get asked is; “Can we have a price for seaView?” seaView is free of charge and it works with all Impact Subsea sensors and pretty much only Impact Subsea sensors so yes, it’s free of charge.

Download from our website. The only part in seaView which is charged for is the flooded member detection application which we covered a couple of weeks ago and that application has a one-time fee associated with it.

That’s an overview of seaView V3, if you want to learn more then check out our other YouTube videos here, on any of the applications of seaView and also check out the seaView page on our website and if you have any technical questions you can always email them through to us at support@impactsubsea.co.uk or give us a phone call, our contact details are below.

That’s all for this week, goodbye.

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ROV / AUV Sonar – ISS360 Live Question & Answer Session.

Transcript

Hello welcome to this week’s live session from Impact Subsea on YouTube. This week I’ll be answering any questions you have on Impact Subsea sensors and systems. I’m Ben Grant, Managing Director at Impact Subsea.

Now for the last few weeks we’ve covered a number of different sensors; we’ve looked at our ISA500 Altimeter Range, our ISM3D Heading, Pitch and Role Sensor Range and our ISD4000 Depth and Temperature Sensor.

ROV / AUV Sonar ISS360 Introduction

This week I thought we’d start things off by having a quick discussion over ROV / AUV Sonars – ISS360. So we offer two ISS360 sonars, we have the original ISS360 which is an extremely compact Imaging Sonar. It’s a mechanically scanning sonar. It gives you a full 360 degree vision around about you. Up to a distance of 90 meters away and it has a very high range resolution of 2.5 millimeters so it gives you really clear imagery.

It’s very compact, you’ve got a titanium housing with a subconn connector and a standard eight pin subconn that we use in all of our sensor solutions. The same wiring as every other sensor we do as well. Inside the boot end here, you’ve got an oil filled section with a transducer in there which rotates round much like a miniature radar but for underwater use. Now, you can see the type of imagery which is produced by the sonar behind me.

You’ve got, one of our sonars have been placed into our test tank here which is a circular, two meter diameter test tank. On the screen you get the kind of top down view of the test tank and you can see the sonar scanning around and that’s shown by the red line rotating around the screen there.

That’s the ROV / AUV Sonar – ISS360 and it’s ideal for ROV and AUV operations, for obstacle avoidance, general awareness of where your vehicle is placed.

ROV / AUV Sonar ISS360HD Introduction

We also offer the ISS360HD which is a bigger version of the sonar and effectively gives you a much higher angular resolution. This is ideal for very high resolution imagery and slightly longer range performance.

The ISS360HD which range out to 100 meters and it’s got a one degree beam width. it’s a very fine slice as opposed to the 2.3 degrees of the ISS360. In terms of physical build, the body is the same as ISS360, as is the connector, as is the pin out.

The main change with the ISS360HD is the boot end. To get the higher angular resolution we need a much wider transducer in there so we’ve got a very wide composite transducer and then the boots extended out, oil filled, there’s a larger diaphragm on top there just to compensate the oil in the boot. As the sonar goes deeper in the water.

The ISS360HD is depth rated down to 6,000 meters ISS360 is depth rated down to 4,000 meters as standard but we do also do a 6,000 meter rated option.

What is the vertical angle of the ISS360 and ISS360HD?

We get asked lots of different questions about sonars and some of the common ones we get asked about is the vertical beam angle between the sonars. With the ISS360 standard sonar it’s got a 2.2 degree beam by 23 degrees like that and that’s ideal for general obstacle avoidance and navigation purposes. The ISS360HD has a 30 degree beam that way and a one degree beam that way. It’s more than twice the angular resolution for ISS360.

How fast does the ISS360 scan?

Another question which often comes up, particularly when discussing scanning sonars is; how quickly does the sonar scan? If you look at the YouTube page or the ISS360 page of our website there’s a lot of example videos which show you the scanning speed at different ranges and different resolutions.

I can also show you the scanning speed just now. Behind us we’ve got an ISS360 sonar in our tank and it’s currently scanning a two meter range, at its lowest resolution setting. What you’re seeing there is the fastest rate which the sonar will scan. That particular sonar is running over Ethernet Communications back to the computer.

I can adjust the scan speed as there’s a little slider bar at the bottom of the screen so you can adjust from the high speed to high resolution and as it’s set to high speed just now, move it up to a higher resolution and higher quality you’ll see the sonar slows down.

As we start to get a much higher resolution, more accurate image of the tank.

Can it be used for obstacle avoidance or navigation?

It’s really designed so if you’re using the sonar for obstacle avoidance you can set it to the fast speed, you just need to know, is there something in front of me? or can I locate a target around you scans round really fast, updates fast, then we get closer to the target you can slow it down a little bit, move it more into the quality setting so you get a higher resolution image and then you can use that for target identification.

You also don’t need to do a full 360 degree scan, you’ve got it there if you need it so if you’ve got it on the top of your vehicle and you want to see everything that’s around you and kind of position yourself relative to another structure or something else subsea, it’s ideal for that. If you just want it for forward-looking obstacle avoidance you can set up a window, I’ll show you that just now.

Let’s turn off full 360 and just do a sector scan. Set it to a 90 degree sector scan just now. We’ll just zoom in so we’ve got that on screen. So there’s your 90 degree sector and it’s just scanning back and forth, giving you an update right there.

You can also set it to use flyback so if we set it to use flyback, it’ll scan one way then zoom back to the other side, scan one way, zoom back to the other side and just gives you a faster update rate. So using flyback and if we drop it to the faster speed setting you get really fast updating scanning sonar it’s ideal for forward-looking navigation.

Which ROV / AUV Sonar – ISS360 is the right one for my application?

Another question we sometimes get asked is which ISS360 sonar is right for my application? That really comes down to exactly what you require. If you need a sonar which is as compact as is practically possible then the ISS360 is ideal and you get a really compact sonar, we believe it’s the smallest imaging sonar in the world. It’s highly compact, it’s pretty lightweight and it’s quite a little power consumption so it’s ideal for a lot of miniature ROVs and a lot of small or even larger AUVS as well, where power is a consideration.

If on the other hand you can accommodate a slightly larger sonar such as maybe on a work class ROV or mid-range ROV then the ROV / AUV Sonar ISS360HD is ideal. This way you benefit from more than twice the angular resolution and you get slightly more range as well as it really comes down to what you can fit on your vehicle and what kind of performance levels you require from the sonar.

How can I interface to the ROV / AUV Sonar ISS360?

One of the other questions we get asked is how can I interface to my ROV / AUV Sonar ISS360? We’ve got a number of options as standard in all ISS360 sonars they all come with serial communications so they come with RS232 Communications and RS485 Communications. RS232 is ideal if you’re running it over a short cable length or up through a fiber mux, up to the surface from your ROV.

Then you’ve got RS485 Communications which is ideal if you just have a screened twisted pair and you can run RS485 comms anywhere up to 1.2 kilometers worth of cable. We’ve tested these ourselves up to a kilometer with the cable so it’s quite a practical way to get comms.

The other way you can get comms is through Ethernet. Ethernet is, from a performance perspective, the most ideal communications protocol as it has plenty of bandwidth so the sonar can scan really quickly and there’s no waiting for the data to be sent from the surface. Everything just gets sent in real time so if you have Ethernet capability available it’s always ideal to use that. It should be the fastest scanning sonar possible.

Do I need to return for regular maintenance?

One of the other questions we get is with regards to maintenance and how often do you have to send this back for servicing?

With all our products we try to make them so the maintenance interval is very long and so they’re designed to run for as long as it’s practically possible in the field without being serviced. All the sonars have a titanium body so you don’t have any corrosion issues. It should last a good long time.

They’ve got a stainless steel connector. Something else that sometimes wears out on scanning sonars is the slip rings. Usually you have a transducer in the boot end which rotates round and it’s connected back to the electronics using slip rings and brush contacts on the slip rings. Over time as it’s a physical contact, it will suffer from wear and tear and you have to send it back to get it swapped out.

With the ROV / AUV Sonar ISS360 Series we did away with slip rings so the transducer is fully inductively coupled to the electronics. As the transducer rotates there’s no physically touching components, there’s nothing to wear out, there’s nothing to require to come back periodically.

Although it’s got a moving transducer in there, moving component, nothing’s touching so it’s a very long life. The main thing you maybe want to send it back for, for service is just a health check and also it allows us to change out the rubber components, to change O-rings and keep all that in good condition.

What software do I use?

I’ve got a question in just now which is: What software are we using? We provide the seaView Software which you can download from our seaView Software page. You can download it free of charge.

The seaView Software runs all our sensors, it runs the altimeters, depth sensors, heading sensors and of course the sonars. In terms of the software, seaView will provide full functionality of the sonar so you can view data, you can log data, you can play back data, you can configure your sonar, it makes it really easy to use.

If you have an application where you don’t want to use our software or you want to directly interface it to an AUV control system or you want to write your own software, we do also provide a software development kit which will provide all functionalities you can get in seaView, provides that direct interface to the sonar and that’s freely available for all of our products.

So that’s a kind of overview of some of the most common questions we get on our ROV / AUV Sonar Series. If you want to learn more about the ISS360 we’ve got a Sonar page on our website which has the the datasheets, manuals, 3D models, lots of videos showing it running, lots of images in the gallery showing exactly what kind of data you can get from the sonar and we also have a few articles on our website which go into detail about the technical performance of the ISS360 Sonar and how we achieve the image quality and the range capabilities which we have.

That’s all from me today, any questions please drop us a line at support@impactsubsea.co.uk and I look forward to seeing you again next week.

Bye for now.

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