Huth began his research into affordable open source alternatives, adopting the Arduino system and its wide variety of sensors. Huth built a solar powered prototype that sensed rain and water runoff and encased it in a waterproof kayaker’s lunchbox. A basic 2G GPRS modem was used to transmit sensor data to ThingSpeak, the IoT analytics platform that allows users to store, analyze, and visualize their data.

In order to deploy these remote environmental monitors (REM) in areas with no cellular connectivity, Hans worked with Sean Keane, an ADEQ intern, on reprogramming the Arduino to work with a RockBLOCK. For the purpose of monitoring discharges from a stocktank and to facilitate sample collection, a RockBLOCK-powered REM was successfully deployed at Horseshoe Draw near the border with Mexico. Given this success, ADEQ plans to deploy nine more cellular and RockBLOCK powered REMs throughout the state prior to the close of July, 2019. ADEQ is in the process of documenting time and money savings from respective deployments.

Huth documented his first environmental monitor’s development and deployment on YouTube to include links to source code for these inventions. Huth’s YouTube channel also includes chapters on building and deploying these REMs, and he is currently working on a new chapter summarizing code and deployment of RockBLOCK-enabled REMs.

The Peruagus is also unique in that it’s self-righting – that is, able to recover unassisted from a capsized position. The boat’s hull is made up of a solid foam core sandwiched between two layers of fiberglass. This makes the Peruagus robust, practically unsinkable while intact, and cheaper to build than most boats of similar size.

The Peruagus features an aluminum skeleton that functions as a heat sink to keep on-board equipment cool, and an epoxy keel that provides directional stability. The finished design is modular, allowing installation of weather monitoring equipment, different keels, even different superstructures and power systems.

Peruagus, meaning ‘roamer’ in Ancient Greek, will be using a RockBLOCK 9603 to send back telemetry data and to receive waypoint instructions as it makes its way west across the Atlantic with the help of a PixHawk Autopilot.

Read more about The Microtransat Challenge.

Our oceans are polluted with plastic. It’s not just strangling sea life or collecting in giant swirling patches the size of countries – tiny microplastics are also abundant in the water, making their way back into the food chain and, ultimately, our plate.

Cleaning up the world’s oceans from plastic isn’t a simple affair. There are three main issues that governments traditionally balk at when faced with a large-scale cleanup – cost, cost, and cost.

Thankfully, the minds behind The Ocean Cleanup came up with an ingenious – and cheap – solution. They designed a system that uses nature to help collect the plastic garbage floating in the ocean.

The system consists of a 600-meter-long, U-shaped float that travels along the water’s surface. Underneath the floater is a 3-meter-deep skirt. The system uses perpetual wind and wave energy to carry the float along at a speed ever so slightly faster than the ocean current. The result is akin to a giant ocean-borne squeegee scouring the ocean, collecting everything from massive discarded fishing nets to millimeter-sized plastic.

The garbage will be rounded up by the curved floater, making it easier for boats to come and collect every few months.
 

According to The Ocean Cleanup: “A full-scale deployment of our systems is estimated to clean up to 50% of the Great Pacific garbage patch in five years.”

 
Rock Seven (now trading as Ground Control)’s RockBLOCKs will be used by a number of open-source drifting buoys deployed to simulate plastic movement around the systems. These ‘maker buoys’ incorporate the 9603 Rockblock, interfaced with an Arduino-based microcontroller.

The cleanup system has been engineered to be sea life-friendly and to withstand the punishing ocean environment. It’s also deployed in an area that sees hardly any marine traffic, although the position of each system will be known and subsequently avoided by vessels.

On September 8th 2018, System 001 was launched from the foundation’s assembly yard in Alameda and towed through the San Francisco Bay, toward the infamous Great Pacific garbage patch. Learn more on The Ocean Cleanup website.

Introduced in a paper published in 2010 in the American Meteorological Society, the AirCore has proven itself a robust atmospheric sampling device used with balloons and other airborne assets. Co-developed by the University of Colorado and the NOAA, the heart of the AirCore is 100m of thin, valve-tipped, and coiled stainless-steel tubing that stores gas but prevents its diffusion.

Initially, known amounts of trace gases called fill gas are pumped into the coil. The valves keep the fill gas inside the coil, but as the AirCore ascends through the atmosphere, the exterior pressure drops and the fill gas slowly escapes out.

At around 95,000 feet, the fill gas has almost completely left the coil and, in this current application by the NOAA team, a payload cutdown controller (PCC), which includes the AirCore and all of its auxiliary communications and logging equipment, is separated from a balloon and begins its parachuted descent.

As the PCC falls to the ground, the external pressure slowly builds up, forcing ambient air through a small magnesium perchlorate-filled canister (to dry the air) and into an open valve back into the coil. At ground level, the AirCore will have collected a vertical profile of undiffuse air, almost like a solid core. Back at the lab, the air is then pushed back out of the coil and analysed, ideally in AirCore pairs to make sure that accurate results have been gathered. The small amount of fill gas left in the AirCore indicates the top of the profile.

The PCC uses a Teensy 3.6 board (similar to an Arduino) that controls the cutter. The RockBLOCK itself is programmed to send out location data every five minutes throughout the flight, from power up prior to launch until about 30 minutes after landing. Two-way communication via the RockBLOCK’s SBD Library also gives the team the ability to cut the balloon loose early in flight. Powering the entire PCC for at least four hours are two rechargeable lithium 18650 2200mAh batteries in series.

Usually, a flight will go according to plan but on two occasions the RockBLOCK has gotten more than it bargained for. As Jack Higgs from the NOAA ESRL Global Monitoring Division explains:
 

“On one flight in Oklahoma last week, the balloon string became tangled with the parachute after cutting so the payload was carried up until the balloon burst. The RockBLOCK reached an altitude of 112,913 feet and low pressure of 5 millibar. It still transmitted its location message at that altitude without any problems. The package was also exposed to a low temperature of -75 degrees C during the flight. The electronics are housed in a Styrofoam package but are not heated. They only benefit from heat generated by the components.”

 
In another instance, the team had to borrow a canoe from a nearby homeowner and paddle out into the middle of a lake to retrieve the PCC. Amazingly, all the electronics were still operating, even though they were all wet inside. The RockBlock was transmitting its location every five minutes while saturated with water and floating horizontally in the lake.

The AirCore’s success has been duplicated on this side of the Atlantic, too. Academic institutions such as the University of East Anglia, University of Groningen, and the Finnish Meteorological Institute have used it for similar research.

More information on the AirCore can be found at the NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory.

Led by Dr. João Borges de Sousa of the Laboratório de Sistemas e Tecnologia Subaquática (LSTS) of Portugal, a multinational, multidisciplinary team of scientists have designed, built, and deployed seven autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in the North Pacific Subtropical Ocean Front using the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel Falkor.

Ocean fronts are areas where drastic changes occur in the properties of waters. These changes are of interest to scientists studying Earth’s climate and marine ecosystems. The particular ocean front examined by the teams is situated about 1,000 nautical miles SW of Southern California. It’s here that less dense and cold waters coming from the Arctic meet the otherwise saline waters of the Pacific.

Three scout ASVs (autonomous surface vehicles) were sent to detect the ocean front ahead of the Schmidt Ocean Institute expedition. The area was then mapped for three weeks by a fleet of AUVs, UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) and the R/V Falkor.

In order to map the 3D structure of this dynamic front, the AUVs cycled in a ‘saw-tooth’ pattern between the water’s surface at a depth of 100 meters. The AUVs were controlled from either the R/V Falkor or across the world from an ocean space center in Portugal, with commands sent via RockBLOCKs and the Iridium network.

Operating 24/7, the AUVs would also periodically upload preliminary sensor data, like temperature, salinity, chlorophyll, and turbidity profiles (water properties at different measured depths).

When interesting features would appear, UAVs were deployed to measure the same features from the air using thermal and multispectral cameras. This feat wouldn’t have been possible using only traditional marine/aerial vehicles, due to the logistical and financial restrictions involved with these larger assets.

In less than three weeks, the AUVs traversed over 1,000 nautical miles, operating approximately for 500 hours and sending over 12,000 transmissions – or 2.5 megabytes of Iridium data – to researchers via Rock Seven (now trading as Ground Control)’s servers.

The mission’s success proves that lower-cost, autonomous, and connected vehicles can play a key role in collecting abundant data sets from remote locations. This allows research vessels like the R/V Falkor to shift their role from being a primary sampling unit to a command center, reducing operational costs while increasing scientific knowledge.

Iridium connectivity also allowed the replica command center based in Portugal to take over the second shift, giving scientists round the clock control of their research assets.

More information about this research can be found in the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s expedition page.