PingData

PingData is a lightweight Python package for reading HumminBird metadata/sonar files and writing them to user-friendly formats, like csv, HDF5, npy, or mat. The package is a fork of Cameron Bodine's PINGMapper project, which provides far more comprehensive (and complex) workflows than this package. This package is completely unopinionated, and provides only raw metadata and sonar data (in integer format) with no post-processing.

Installation

PingData can be installed directly from GitHub using pip. First, create and activate a virtual environment:

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

Next, install the package:

pip install git+https://github.com/NeptuneProjects/PingData.git

Usage

Top-level functions are provided in the cli.py module. Conversion can be accomplished directly from the command line. Consider an input metadata file, path/to/Rec00001.DAT:

pingdata path/to/Rec00001.DAT

In this case, both metadata and sonar data will be written to a directory with the same stem as the input file, i.e., path/to/Rec00001/*. To specify an output directory, use the -o flag:

pingdata path/to/Rec00001.DAT -o custom/path

Data will be saved to custom/path/Rec00001/*.

Water temperature and sound speed can be optionally passed:

pingdata <input_file> -t 14.6 -s 1510.3

The output format can be specified with the -f flag:

pingdata <input_file> -f mat

The available formats are:

• hdf5
• mat
• npy

Regardless of the format chosen, metadata will always be written to a .csv file located in the same directory as the other outputs.