themachinethatgoesping

themachinethatgoesping (short: Ping) is created to enable advanced processing of multibeam and singlebeam echosounder data. Core components of this library are implemented in C++ (for performance) and then exposed as high level python interfaces (for usability). On top of the core, many libraries, tools and applications are implemented in Python directly, making use of the fast prototyping features of this language.

Ping currently supports Kongsberg .all/.wcd, .kmall/.kmwcd and Simrad .raw (EK80) formats. More formats will be added in the future.

Note

Ping is still in development. If you are interested in our plans and time line, contact me: peter.urban@ugent.be

Where to start?

New to python

Before you can use Ping, you need to install python on your system and understand the basics of the language. If you are new to python, there are many good tutorials on the internet. We linked some in the New to python section.

Once you understand how to install python and python packages on your system, and you are able to execute a tutorial e.g. in a jupyter notebook, you are ready to progress to the next section.

Python user

Ping is available on PyPi and can be installed with pip:

pip

$ pip install themachinethatgoesping

miniforge/mamba

# Latest development releases are made available on the themachinethatgoesping channel
$ mamba install themachinethatgoesping -c themachinethatgoesping

anaconda/conda

# Latest development releases are made available on the themachinethatgoesping channel
$ conda install themachinethatgoesping -c themachinethatgoesping

If you need help setting up a python environment, see the New to python section. For more details on the installation see Installation (user). To install from source see Installation from source (developer). To get started with Ping check out the Tutorials section. Even if you consider yourself a user, rather than a developer, please check out the Contribute section, as it contains some useful information on how to report bugs and request features.

Developer / contributor

If you want to contribute to Ping you want to install it from source using meson and ninja (instead of pip). For details see Installation from source (developer). You may also want to check out the Contribute section.

Acknowledgements / Funding

• The code of this project is partly based on code that was written while working for the DeepSea Monitoring Group at GEOMAR, Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research, Kiel, Germany.

• Current development is happening at Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium within the project that is financed by the Belgian Science Policy Office and further within the project which enabled i.e. the implementation of the new Kongsberg .kmall file format

• Additional contributions come from , a hydroacoustics and software consultancy based in Delft, The Netherlands