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Integrating into 3rd Party Products: Using FarSounder's SDK
Recently, we've decided make the standard SDK for our navigation product available to 3rd party developers free of charge for non-commercial applications. This makes sense in today's information driven world, since here at FarSounder, we are in the business of selling sonars and providing ship operators with the best underwater situational awareness possible. We're not in the business of selling closed APIs. This opens up an exciting number of possibilities for people interested in integrating FarSounder’s forward looking sonar data into their products.
Our Mobile Test Trailer: Fending Off Snow, Rain, and Sun
One of the aspects of working at FarSounder that is pretty exciting to our team is all the field testing we do. We make sure that all of our developers, engineers, and sales staff get a chance to participate in some level of testing in order to make sure everyone has a solid understanding of our product. We develop 3D forward looking sonars and diver detection systems primarily for ship based solutions. Obviously, this means that we do a lot of testing on various vessels around the world. For the most part, these vessels are big enough to have nice cabins for our equipment and to shelter us from the elements.
Using Forward Looking Sonar in Multibeam Surveys
A number of FarSounder's installations are on survey vessels. The most obvious use of our 3D forward looking sonar products is to provide realtime obstacle avoidance information to the survey vessel. By definition, if an area is being surveyed, then the bathymetry is unknown. These customers can use our equipment to help protect the very expensive survey equipment. Certainly, if the survey is part of a post dredging verification, the risk of damaging equipment is low.
Detecting Marine Life with Our Sonar
Lots of people have asked us if we can see fish and other small marine life. The original motivation for FarSounder's sonar technology came from protecting the marine environment. We wanted to find a way to reduce the chances oil spills and the killing of protected species such as whales due to misguided ocean vessels. Our navigation products have been designed for 3D forward looking obstacle avoidance and are able to detect obstacles like large whales and rocks using environmentally benign signals.