Friday, May 2, 2014

A New Toy ...er, I Mean New Tool

Here are some screen captures and videos of the test run for my new Vexilar Sonar Phone T-Pod using a Nexus 7 (2012) running Kit Kat 4.4.2 and test it's new screen recording API. Although the videos get a little jerky in places because the recording software is dropping frames (Limitations of the ARM processor) it's smooth as silk 'live'.

First some screen caps and a video of the first run. The water (Mississippi River) was on the rise and full of crud plus it was very windy so there is a lot of surface noise. Lowering the gain to 25-30% helped a lot








 The next set I found out that if you want to record in landscape mode you need to be in landscape mode when you start the recording. Unfortunately that wasn't readily apparent until after I got home since there is no hint of a problem on the screen. The opening/set up screen of the Vexilar software starts in the portrait mode which is why I had it turned in portrait mode when I started the video recording.







I went over to the other side and this run shows how easy it is to get up and running once the T-Pod is the the water long enough to turn itself on.  None of these videos were edited and are in their raw format.










This unit seems to work well and on par with dedicated color fishfinders in the $200-300 range. The WiFi worked as far as I was able to cast and I only lost the hook up once and that's when it was in the rocks along the shore. I would say the main limiting factor will be the sunlight visibility of the LCD on the phone or tablet used. I had to find some shade on the Nexus 7 to see the screen decently(Same reason I have a 'PC Hood' on my chartplotter)