SONAR SYSTEM SOFTWARE AND HARDWARE DEVELOPMENT: FISH FINDER APPLICATION

Abstract

A study of how to develop a sonar system is presented in this thesis. A typical sonar system has two sub circuits, namely, transmit path and receive path. On transmit path, HV (high voltage) pulses are generated and transmitted into the water using a transducer. On the receive path, the echo of the transmitted signal is received. This received signal is then amplified and converted into digital data using an ADC. The digital data is then sent to a PC for signal processing. After signal processing, the results are shown in a GUI.

Software technologies used in this study include Fish Finder GUI, Visual C++ GUI and back-end code, AFE5809 GUI, and High Speed Data Converter Pro (by Texas Instruments). Matlab was used to develop the Fish Finder GUI similar to commercial fish finders. The Fish Finder GUI also does noise filtering as well as calculating the depth and distance to the detected objects. Visual C++ was used to develop a software, called, Control GUI. This software, receives the data from the TSW1400, saves the data as a .CSV file. It also connects all used software programs together to work as a complete fish finder system.

The developed sonar system was tested in 1-meter water, as well as 10-meter shore side test. First, HV pulse was generated and transmitted into the water. After that, the echo of the pulse was captured. Then, the echo was converted into digital data. Finally, the digital data was the digital data results were successfully shown in the GUIs.