The Development Of Acoustic Ocean Current Meter Measuring Instruments

China is a maritime country, but not a maritime power. In order to achieve this vision, it needs to get technical support from the ocean automatic observation technology in many fields, for example marine economy development, exploitation and utilization, scientific research, integrated management and marine military activities etc. Advanced automatic ocean observation instruments is a necessary prerequisite for stepping into maritime powers. Ocean currents is an important hydrological factor, while simultaneity real-time monitoring and measurement of ocean flow field is also an important part of the marine expedition.With the continuous development of intelligent networking information technology, embedded system technology has gained broad space for development. It has become a new technology hot point and direction of development. Embedded system is an application-centric computer system, whose software and hardware can be cut. It has been widely used in the field of industrial control. With the increasing demand for applications, higher requirements for the performance of the control device have been put forward accordingly.This topic is about 500m high-accuracy acoustic current meters consisting of sensor portion(by Donghai Station development), and instrument portion(developed by the ocean University of China), which is a sub-topic of deepwater high precision acoustic current meters and large depth towing profile measuring system pertained to the National High Technology Research and Development Program(863 Program). This paper discusses the part of the instrument, namely the development of acoustic ocean current meter measuring instruments. Based on the full understanding of the background of current meter, the research developments in China and abroad as well as embedded technology, it is corresponding to establish the communication protocols of acoustic current gauge meter, hardware platforms and software implementations.The Hardware platform, with microcontroller STM32F107VCT6 as its core, is introduced in detail on system master controller module, calendar clock module, keyboard input module, liquid crystal display module, data storage module, pressure sensor module and attitude sensor module according to functional requirements. Based on modular software approach and the development of a communication protocol, the corresponding software design consisting of communication system between meter and the main controller, keypad interface driver, data storage and playback and LCD display is achieved on IAR development platform, with C programming language. Precision measurement of various parameters like velocity, orientation, temperature, posture and depth of seawater flow is realized. This system can improve the work efficiency with high stability, reliability, and simple operation through verification.Finally, in-depth summary and outlook of following complement work are given in this paper.