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OceanTools Video Overlay Tutorial

The video provides a tutorial on how to configure and use the OceanTools Video Overlay (VO4) software. It has 4 input and output video channels and 3 COM ports. The tutorial explains how to configure input data strings from an ROV and survey to display overlays of key information like heading, depth, coordinates and time. It involves setting up serial port configurations, defining substrings from input data formats, mapping substrings to data fields, and adding text fields to a page for display. When completed, it allows overlaying of live ROV and survey data in multiple formats onto video feeds.

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Filip Em
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270 views10 pages

OceanTools Video Overlay Tutorial

The video provides a tutorial on how to configure and use the OceanTools Video Overlay (VO4) software. It has 4 input and output video channels and 3 COM ports. The tutorial explains how to configure input data strings from an ROV and survey to display overlays of key information like heading, depth, coordinates and time. It involves setting up serial port configurations, defining substrings from input data formats, mapping substrings to data fields, and adding text fields to a page for display. When completed, it allows overlaying of live ROV and survey data in multiple formats onto video feeds.

Uploaded by

Filip Em
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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[ROV] OceanTools Video

Overlay Tutorial
Published on November 8, 2019

Anh Dao 4 articles Follow


ROV Supervisor - SMD & Seaeye

The OceanTools Video Overlay (VO4) is quite common and has been
around many years. With few steps below you will find it fairly easy to
use. It has 4 input video channels and 4 output video channels and 3
input COM ports. Only a single overlay will be displayed on all 4 video
channels.
During operation, it's required overlay to have following data but not
limited:

- ROV heading / depth / altitude

- Easting / Northing / KP / DCC

- Date / Time 

The first three data are from ROV and the rest are from survey. Connect
your video and data to corresponding BNC and DB9 connectors on the
back as you can see in the picture above. Powering up VO4 should start
the software automatically.

1. Configure Input Data String

First thing is to configure your input data. To able to do that you need
to know the format of the data. Surveyor should be responsible for the
format of navigation data. Following is one of these formats including
9 sub strings separated by comma. End of string is Carriage Return
(CR) and Line Feed (LF) which are normal for most of ASCII strings.

Data string format:

Date,Time,KP,Easting,Northing,Bathy,Altimeter,Heading,Distance Off
Line<CR><LF>

You could also check live data using hyper terminal if string format is
not given.

Go to overlay software, right click on screen and choose Configure


Inputs...

Select Input Type is Serial Input. You can create a new one with easy
to remember name as "Petronas Myanmar 2014 - Survey Data"
Select Edit to open Serial Input Configuration. Set Baud, Parity,
Data, Stop as given by surveyor. Default settings for most of serial
data are 9600-None-8-1 as shown below. String Start and String
End are used to validate the input. If you set it wrong, you won't get
any data. The survey string format mentioned above is a little bit
special. It starts with Date and this string (e.g. 20/08/2014) will change
so you can't use this as String Start. Fortunately, it ends with normal 2
characters <CR><LF>. Therefore, you can use one of them as Start
(LF) and the other one is End (CR). In VO4 software, symbol for LF
is %0A and for CR is %0D

You can also give a String Example to make it easier for setup sub
strings and data field. The survey string contains 9 sub strings so I
number it from 1 to 9. Click Check to see whether your example
matches rules.
Click Next to go to advance settings. Add all sub strings, named them
as Sub01,...,Sub09. Because length of most sub strings will vary. For
example, a heading of 326.53 has 6 characters but 26.53 has only 5
characters. Therefore, all sub strings should be defined
using Instance instead of Position. In the following picture, Sub01 is
defined as all characters between the first intance of %0A (i.e. LF) and
the first intance of comma.

Try to change offset then Evaluate to get the correct sub string. For


Sub01 as an example, if you type start offset is 1 and end offset
is 0 then you will get Sub01 = 1,

You know it's not right because you should get 1 instead of 1, so just
change end offset to -1 and now you get Sub01 = 1
After finish setting up sub strings, continue with data field. Add all data
fields you need then type in Expression the corresponding sub string
for it e.g. Date is Sub01.

Congratulation! You have done configuration for survey data. Now


repeat these above steps for ROV data.

2. Select Inputs

Next step is Select Inputs... by select on right click menu. Select


corresponding profile on COM port.

3. Edit Page

Now go to an empty page and add display. Data Field is only selected


via Text Field
Rename to make it easier to remember

Right click and choose Configure...

On Text Field Configuration click Change


Select Petronas Myanmar 2014 - Survey Data on drop down list
of Available Inputs and Easting from available fields.

On Text Field Configuration, you can also change font size and
color,... and number formatting. Type 0.00 will make your easting only
displayed with 2 digits after decimal. Font size of 14 should be alright.

Now you can add some Text Box beside your Text Field to make it's
easier to understand. Then uncheck Edit Page on right click menu to
check your real data.
Repeat these above steps for all Text Field then you should have an
overlay like this:

Then with data

You can also rename the page so you can remember which one is this
Hope this help!

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Published by
Anh Dao 4 articles Follow
ROV Supervisor - SMD & Seaeye
Published • 3y

[ROV] OceanTools Video Overlay Tutorial

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