User’s Manual v5.1.66 June 5, 2012

ArborSonic 3D User’s Manual

Introduction Welcome as a new ArborSonic 3D owner. ArborSonic 3D is designed to detect hidden holes and decay in trees by non-destructive acoustic testing. Manufacturer information ArborSonic 3D is manufactured by: Company: Fakopp Enterprise Bt. Address: City: ZIP: Country: E-mail: [email protected] Principle of operation • Several Sensors are placed around the trunk, which are coupled to the wood by steel nails. • Each Sensor is tapped by a hammer. • The unit measures the travel-time of the sound wave generated by the hammer tap between each sensor. • If there is a hole, then the sound...

ArborSonic 3D User’s Manual Hardware – System parts Piezo Sensors Amplifier Boxes (black) Battery Box (grey) containing the Bluetooth transmitter Cords Caliper Sensor Remover Tape measure Steel and rubber hammer Case

ArborSonic 3D User’s Manual Hardware - Setup Drive the Sensors into the trunk in a counter-clockwise order when seen from above. Connect the Sensors to the Amplifier boxes. Connect the Amplifiers in a line. The bottom connector goes to the side connector of the next box. Connect the Battery Box to the Amplifier on any end of the line. Establish cable or Bluetooth connection to t

Hardware - Handling the Piezo Sensors Maintenance • Always keep the nails and the head clean because dirt influences the coupling. • The numbers on the sensors are just decoration, you can change them freely (however the numbers on the amplifier boxes are important). Fixing • Use the rubber hammer to fix the sensors • The sensors need to penetrate the bark • Good coupling between the nail and the wood is essential. The coupling is good if the sensor head can't be rotated with 3 stretched fingers. • The sensors need to be in intact wood material, not in decay. • The software requires the penetration...

ArborSonic 3D User’s Manual Hardware – Amplifier boxes • • • • • • When building up, first fix the sensors, then the amplifiers and finally the cables When breaking down, first remove the cables, then the amplifiers and finally the sensors Never move the sensors with attached amplifiers because it may damage the cable connectors. Make sure to apply correct connector orientation when connecting the cables. Amplifier numbering is essential. Don’t cross a cable because it will mess up the whole measurement. Connect the bottom connector of an amplifier box to the side connector of the next box. Contains...

Hardware - Bluetooth and serial connection • The Battery Box of the device is responsible for collecting and trasmitting data to the PC. There are two basic ways to establish connection: over a Serial-USB cable or over the built-in Bluetooth module. • There are two steps in setting up the connection. The first is to install the USB cable or the Bluetooth device in Windows. In either way a COM port is assigned to the connection with a specific number. The second step is to set this number in the software. The software provides support for both steps. • The part below deals with setting up the...

ArborSonic 3D User’s Manual • If any data could be received, the software selects the COM port where it was received and you get a notification. At this point everything is set up for the connection. Now you can click OK to close this panel. To check if everything is fine, restart the program, create a dummy layer with some dummy geometry parameters (the simplest is to choose a circle), and go to the Time Data page. If the connection is set up successfully, a green “Reading Device” message should appear. Start tapping the sensors and you should see rows of numbers arriving in the table be

ArborSonic 3D User’s Manual Software – Basics • • • The latest version of the software can be downloaded at http://www.fakopp.com. The software can be installed to any PC with Windows XP or higher. The software is responsible for: o Selecting parameters of the tree (species, ...) o Registering the geometry of the sensors o Collecting the time data from ArborSonic 3D over Bluetooth o Computing the internal cross-sectional tomogram o Performing stability calculations of the whole tree o Generating a report file for customers o Saving and opening previous projects The steps of a measurement are:...

ArborSonic 3D User’s Manual Software – Application Settings • To access the application settings, click . This panel is divided into several tabs for changing different setting of the software. On the User Connection tab you can leave your contact details which will only be used in case of software problems so we can get in touch with you and help with the solution. In case of a software problem an error report is sent to us in email. You can select whether this email should be sent automatically or not and whether it should contain your contact information and the current project. On the User...

• Auto filter limit is the difference limit in time which if reached results the measured time row to be filtered out. The default setting is 20. • Min. good row count is the number of required good time measurements from each sensor. The default setting is 3. • Minimal and maximal T0 are internal time correction limit parameters which are out of the scope of this manual. The default settings are 20 and 35. • Velocity scale controls the scale of the 3D map in the z axis. • Rel Time Error Threshold controls the level above which the values in the time matrix on the Time Data panel are shown as...

ArborSonic 3D User's Manual which contains the last 20 species you used. To select a species which is not in this list, click the —_ button. A new window pops up where you can navigate in the taxonomical list of tree species. This list contains above 3000 species. To speed up the search process, you don't need to click through the whole tree to find a species, but you can simply start typing the English or Latin name of the species. To jump to the next candidate, click or hit the enter button. After selecting the desired species, click OK to close this window. The rest of this page contains various...