Leica BLK360-2 Drive Speed

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wmta
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Leica BLK360-2 Drive Speed

Post by wmta »

Does anyone know what your speed of the internal storage. I am curious if speed of the ubc disk drive is up to modern standards for portable hard disk. From my experience with the BLK2Go the transfer of data to my computer is very slow. I hope this is improved. The speed of transfer of data a critical to the time for processing.

Has anyone done a real review of this system. It looks good on paper but where is a independent review ?
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Re: Leica BLK360-2 Drive Speed

Post by badam »

I don't wanna be rude, and i don't have experience with it, but i don't think it will be faster then the original blk360 g1. So not expect lithning fast transfers. And if the hdr imagery is a must (like in the rtc360), then the import speed is gonna be slower.
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Re: Leica BLK360-2 Drive Speed

Post by wmta »

the hard drive speed in new computer are 100 faster that the hard drive from a few years ago. I do expect them to upgrade speed of hard drive to easy of transfer
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Re: Leica BLK360-2 Drive Speed

Post by badam »

wmta wrote: Thu Aug 18, 2022 9:53 pm the hard drive speed in new computer are 100 faster that the hard drive from a few years ago. I do expect them to upgrade speed of hard drive to easy of transfer
1) hard drive speeds are not faster at all, they stod the same. Just sizes grown.
2) there is no hard drive in the blk 360.
3) most probably the storage device on the blk360 is a single nand flash which is not really fast. Just see how fast an sd card is.
4) the blk360 produces *.blk archived files during transfers rather then just copying files. And this will be depend on the processing cpu (i think in the blk itself)

Sidenote:
See how slow the gen1 blk with usb cable support... it downloads like 30-40 mbit/s that is for sure not the limitations of the link speed. This is come from converting and storage speed. Nand flash only can be faster if there are multiple of them accompanied by a controller, like in an ssd. But that takes up space. Seeing the new blk size. I would not expect too much change. But as i told you these are just my thoughts. I don't have it hand on nor seen it in the flesh.
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Re: Leica BLK360-2 Drive Speed

Post by manorsessions »

It is desperately slow if it was a horse it would be at the glue factory. I have time to write this as I have waited 1 hour so far to import 2 out of 4 scans. I thought a real time timeline might be helpful rather than anecdotally explaining how slow this is. I thought it would be funny but if you get to the end we are at 5 hours for importing and I'm yet to get 4 scans in totaling 26 mins and there are another 12 to go.

The 4 scans are 16gb combined. As a comparison the new samsung T7 USBC NVME 4TB portable hard disk I bought for $320 the other day (and is about the size of one of the BLK2Go batteries) transfers to and from my PC at 600Mbps and is rated to 1000Mbps. So as a comparison my cheap portable hard disk would do the transfer in 30 seconds the blk2go looks like it is going to be 1.5hrs minimum (update, this could take all night currently as I write this we are over 3 hours and 28% percent imported).

Never mind the fact that on a demonstration from the dealer the import crashed every time including when I downloaded the files from the scanner via its web interface and then imported them. Definate software issue even though I had done a new install of the latest version of Cyclone. Eventually it imported 1 x 4 min walk and exported to Recap but all the photo bubbles were missing so the scan was effectively useless for what we typically use them for. Complete fail, quick scan, useless output. I'd rather have spent another 45 mins doing another 10 scans on a blk360 and have usable data.

Today after testing in the field I tried importing the first 2 "walks" about 10 mins each and after crashing Cyclone and then crashing my machine (it is new and high end), after an hour it completed the import and there was nothing in it just two bubbles representing the 2 walks but no points and no photos just a big black screen of nothing with two red dots.

I tried downloading the scans via the web interface. The issue was that Chrome would say the download was complete but the files wouldn't actually complete and convert from being a "download file" to an actual usable file so the scanner would think it wasn't complete so wouldn't move onto the next file. So after trying again and again I just have version 1 2 and 3 of the same scan that is a temporary download file. So the web interface is useless. I really don't understand why it can't mount as a storage device so you could just use the windows browser to download the files.

During the scan inside a 1 level warehouse I had 5 slam scanning errors requiring rebooting the scanner each time, embarassing in front of the client.

I'm now at 1hr 10mins and the import is at 18% for a 600m2 building. And this is the third attempt at importing.

I've had a blk360 for a number of years which while as flakey as all getout as far as errors, connection, forgetting the wireless password, missing large pieces in the photos, showing the scans upside down or on a massive angle, not downloading to the ipad or randomly taking 30mins to download 1 scan, no ability to access the tablet through your PC only wirelessly, at least you could get it to work and get the data into Autodesk Recap.

I might have a different opinion if this scan ever actually imports but if I have to go out and redo it with a blk360 just to make sure that I actually capture somethign that I can actually get off the scanner I would never buy a blk3go unless there is a massive upgrade in a version 2. Or have it port the data to your phone app like on the blk360 so you aren't reliant on the scanner actually being the download device which is obviously flawed.

During the scanning today the app would drop out and when you reconnected it to the scanner while still scanning wouldn't show anything it had captured before you reconnected it. And mind you the phone was in a holder on my wrist right next to the scanner.

I'm now at 1hr 20mins and the import is still at 18%.

My processor is sitting at 75% on a new Xenon 8 core with 25% of RAM used.

The blk360 would have taken me 4 times longer to scan but I wouldn't have wasted 5 hours watching imports crash resulting in nothing achieved at the end of an entire day.

If the scanner was $5k I'd say it was reasonable value, but a pain in the rear end to actually get information out of. At $50k I'd return it for a refund in my country where it is $96k I'd say it's a very expensive paperweight.

I'm now at 1hr 30 mins and it's still starting the import of 3 out of 4 scans at 18%.

If I actually get the data out of it in a level of quality that I could actually bill the client without being embarassed I'll update my comments.

I'm now at 1hr 40 mins and it's still starting the import of 3 out of 4 scans. CPU is at 26%, this is a joke.

I'm now at 1hr 50 mins and it's still starting the import of 3 out of 4 scans.

I went and cooked dinner and had dinner with the family

I'm now at 2hr 50 mins and it's now importing 4 of 4 at 25%. Seriously I could have scanned this with a blk360 got back to the office and have imported it finished it exported it and be done hours ago. This is now nearly 9 hours of my day and I haven't seen a result yet. And this is only 4 of 16 scans I did. So this could literaly take 3 days to get 4 small warehouses imported.

I'm now at 3hrs and it's at 27%.

3hrs 10mins and we've hit 28% and this is just for the small office attached to a warehouse, 9 small offices, meeting room, boardroom, lunchroom. external 4 min scan of facade. And it's not just the time its that I've seen it fail so many times before it finishes that it isn't like I can have the confidence that I can just bring the scanner back and download all the files via web interface over night and then open 5 copies of cyclone on the same machine and do all the imports tomorrow.

One of the issues is because you can't preview what you are importing, if you've been out for the day scanning a couple of buildings you're really want to take note of the scan numbers so you don't waste an additional hour importing a scan from another building. I'm sure this edit is available in the phone app but still a map thumbnail for something would be handy.

Yay, it finished importing. Ok, credit where credit is due the result is impressive nowhere near the density of the blk360 but no missed spaces and an epic number of spherical photos. For architectural work so far if you can bare the wait time on import and failed imports and computer crashes the end result is impressive. However I now need to go back and get a 5th scan that was part of it and then export to Recap where my judgement lies as that is how we use it both in Recap, Revit and Bim360.

All in all so far the BLK2GO is an absolutely amazing achievement as to what can be fitted in a small device, startrek level not belivable a decade ago, however it feels rushed like the first iphone which was fairly useless to anyone in business as it couldn't connect to an exchange server. I recon another couple of years of prototypes and their software engineers actually aligning with the device could produce a result in the next couple of years that might be seamless. First step, put an NVME drive in it so the imports aren't agonising, I could live with the rest of the problems.

Now at 4 hours and pulling the 5 scan in now half hour into the 5th scan import at 6% which hopefully will complete the building but I fear there is a 6th that may be needed so this could be an 8 hour import. When it is only using 35% of the processor and the machine has an NVME drive it is transfering to it is down to the fact that the data transfer rate is embarrassing from the BLK2GO unit for USBC. I've attached an image, it is not a big building, it is a one level warehouse with an office attached.
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Re: Leica BLK360-2 Drive Speed

Post by Martin_au »

Hmmm
I just copy via the browser over wifi on 10.1.1.1 using either an iPad or laptop. Usually gets all the scans done (typically 4-20 GB) on one battery. Main thing is to get them setup close to each other so the wifi is a strong signal without much interference.

Importing into Cyclone takes a while though.
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Re: Leica BLK360-2 Drive Speed

Post by Daniel Wujanz »

Dear all,

just a small vendor-neutal comment on the issue. Yes, drive-speed matters. However, how efficiently the code behind data processing is implemented has got a massive impact onto running times. During processing data types may need to be converted, data can be added to spatial structures such as octrees, functions are called, objects are created and deleted. All of that requires memory and of course runtime.

It is ironic at times that people love to talk about the speed of the latest hardware but not about the efficency of software and data formats.

We did a comparison of six different E57 export functions from different vendors (https://openpointcloudformats.org/docs/ - scroll to the very bottom) with equal or approximately the same amount of points. The ratio between slowest and fastest software exceeded 6!!! Same hardware, just different software.

Cheers

Daniel
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Re: Leica BLK360-2 Drive Speed

Post by pburrows145 »

Just transfer via cable to BLK Data Manager and import the *.blk files to Cyclone REGISTER 360+?

OR

Build the database in Cyclone FIELD 360, export a registered E57, import that to Cyclone REGISTER 360+ for final checks?

OR

Connect directly to Cyclone REGISTER 360+?

OR

Connect to Cyclone FIELD 360 and import to REG360+?

Lots of different options...

The speed of import of the new BLK360 data structure is VERY fast...

As for getting the data from the BLK2GO, I tend to use the cabled option via the web interface to get the B2G's...
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