Supercon 2024: Exploring The Ocean With Open Source Hardware

April 17, 2025 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

If you had to guess, what do you think it would take to build an ocean-going buoy that could not only survive on its own without human intervention for more than two years, but return useful data the whole time? You’d probably assume such a feat would require beefy hardware, riding inside an expensive and relatively large watertight vessel of some type — and for good reason, the ocean is an unforgiving environment, and has sent far more robust hardware to the briny depths.

But as Wayne Pavalko found back in 2016, a little planning can go a long way. That’s when he launched the first of what he now calls Maker Buoys: a series of solar-powered drifting buoys that combine a collection of off-the-shelf sensor boards with an Arduino microcontroller and an Iridium Short-Burst Data (SBD) modem in a relatively simple watertight box.

He guessed that first buoy might last a few weeks to a month, but when he finally lost contact with it after 771 days, he realized there was real potential for reducing the cost and complexity of ocean research.

Wayne recalled the origin of his project and updated the audience on where it’s gone from there during his 2024 Supercon talk, Adventures in Ocean Tech: The Maker Buoy Journey. Even if you’re not interested in charting ocean currents with homebrew hardware, his story is an inspirational reminder that sometimes a fresh approach can help solve problems that might at first glance seem insurmountable.

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Keeping Watch Over The Oceans With Data Buoys

December 28, 2023 by Dan Maloney 12 Comments

When viewed from just the right position in space, you’d be hard-pressed to think that our home planet is anything but a water world. And in all the ways that count, you’d be right; there’s almost nothing that goes on on dry land that isn’t influenced by the oceans. No matter how far you are away from an ocean, what’s going on there really matters.

But how do we know what’s going on out there? The oceans are trackless voids, after all, and are deeply inhospitable to land mammals such as us. They also have a well-deserved reputation for eating anything that ventures into them at the wrong time and without the proper degree of seafarer’s luck, and they also tend to be places where the resources that run our modern technological society are in short supply.

Gathering data about the oceans is neither cheap nor easy, but it’s critically important to everything from predicting what the weather will be next week to understanding the big picture of what’s going on with the climate. And that requires a fleet of data buoys, outnumbering the largest of the world’s navies and operating around the clock, keeping track of wind, weather, and currents for us.

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What Can You Do With Discarded Fish Aggregation Devices

April 13, 2023 by Jenny List 21 Comments

Often we bring you projects at the end of their trajectory so that you can marvel at a job well done, but sometimes we point you instead to the start of the story. Such is the case with [Brett Smith]’s investigation of discarded fish aggregation buoys, referred to as FADs. These 700-plus dollar devices are deployed in the ocean in the thousands by commercial fishing fleets, and most are not recovered. He’s looking at them from the point of view of re-using their technology in the marine conservation business.

His progress has been documented in a series of short YouTube videos, starting with an introduction that we’ve placed below the break. So far he’s gone on to a complete teardown, and then a detailed look at the PCB. Inside they have a solar charger for a bank of NiCd cells, an echo sounder, a GPS receiver, and an Iridium satellite modem allowing the device to phone home. There’s certainly plenty in there to experiment with, including a few slightly exotic parts, so keep an eye on his channel as we’re sure to see more.

These devices have never made it to Hackaday before, but we have seen an echo sounder on a surfboard.

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Untethered: Fishing Without Lines

October 20, 2020 by Bryan Cockfield 23 Comments

There’s a laundry list of ways that humans are polluting the earth, and even though it might not look like it from the surface, the oceans seem to bear the brunt of our waste. Some research suggests that plastic doesn’t fully degrade as it ages, but instead breaks down into smaller and smaller bits that will be somewhere the in environment for such a long time it could be characterized in layman’s terms as forever.

Not only does waste of all kinds make its way to the oceans by rivers or simply by outright dumping, but commercial fishing gear is estimated to comprise around 10% of the waste in the great blue seas, and one of the four nonprofits help guide this year’s Hackaday Prize is looking to eliminate some of that waste and ensure it doesn’t cause other problems for marine life. This was the challenge for the Conservation X Labs dream team, three people who were each awarded a $6,000 micro-grant to work full time for two months on the problem.

It isn’t about simply collecting waste in the ocean, but rather about limiting the time that potentially harmful but necessary fishing equipment is in the water in the first place. For this two-month challenge, this team focused on long lines used by professional fishing operations to attach buoys to gear like lobster pots or crab traps. These ropes are a danger to large ocean animals such as whales when they get tangled in them and, if the lines detach from the traps, the traps themselves continue to trap and kill marine life for as long as they are lost underwater. This “ghost gear” is harmful in many different ways, and reducing its time in the water or “soak time” was the goal for the project.

Let’s take a closer look at their work after the break, and we can also see the video report they filed as the project wrapped up.

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Drone Buoy Drifts Along The Gulf Stream For Citizen Science

August 13, 2020 by Dan Maloney 26 Comments

It may be named after the most famous volleyball in history, but “Wilson” isn’t just a great conversationalist. [Hayden Brophy] built the free-drifting satellite buoy to see if useful science can be done with off-the-shelf hardware and on a shoestring budget. And from the look of the data so far, Wilson is doing pretty well.

Wilson belongs to a class of autonomous vessels known as drifters, designed to float along passively in the currents of the world’s ocean. The hull of [Hayden]’s drifter is a small Pelican watertight case, which contains all the electronics: Arduino Pro Trinket, GPS receiver, a satellite modem, and a charger for the LiPo battery. The lid of the case is dominated by a 9 W solar panel, plus the needed antennas for GPS and the Iridium uplink and a couple of sensors, like a hygrometer and a thermometer. To keep Wilson bobbing along with his solar panel up, there’s a keel mounted to the bottom of the case, weighted with chains and rocks, and containing a temperature sensor for the water.

Wilson is programmed to wake up every 12 hours and uplink position and environmental data as he drifts along. The drifter was launched into the heart of the Gulf Stream on August 8, about 15 nautical miles off Marathon Key in Florida, by [Captain Jim] and the very happy crew of the “Raw Deal”. As of this writing, the tracking data shows that Wilson is just off the coast of Miami, 113 nautical miles from launch, and drifting along at a stately pace of 2.5 knots. Where the buoy ends up is anyone’s guess, but we’ve seen similar buoys make it all the way across the Atlantic, so here’s hoping that hurricane season is kind to Wilson.

We think this is great, and congratulations to [Hayden] for organizing a useful and interesting project.

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Intellibuoy Keeps Track Of The Water

November 29, 2017 by John Baichtal 14 Comments

With world oceans ranging in cleanliness from pretty nasty to OMG, we need to get a handle on what exactly is going on. High School students from Hackensack, NJ built the Intellibuoy, a floating water quality sensor. The buoy has an anemometer and digital rain gauge up top, as well as a LED beacon to comply with maritime regulations.

Flotation is provided by a framework of sealed 3/4″ and 3″ PVC pipes that look strong enough to protect the electronics from a casual boat-bump. High above the water (under ideal conditions) there is the waterproof control box, packing two Arduino UNOs which listen to the sensors. A turbidity sensor measures how much silt is in the water; the other sensors measure Ph, dissolved oxygen, and temperature. The sensor pod is suspended inside a double ring of PVC for maximum protection. Each ‘Duino also has a SD card shield that stores the data of the respective sensors.

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Low-cost Drift Buoy Plies The Atlantic For Nearly A Year

April 28, 2017 by Dan Maloney 34 Comments

Put a message in a bottle and toss it in the ocean, and if you’re very lucky, years later you might get a response. Drop a floating Arduino-fied buoy into the ocean and if you’ve engineered it well, it may send data back to you for even longer.

At least that’s what [Wayne] has learned since his MDBuoyProject went live with the launching of a DIY drift buoy last year. The BOM for the buoy reads like a page from the Adafruit website: Arduino Trinket, an RTC, GPS module, Iridium satellite modem, sensors, and a solar panel. Everything lives in a clear plastic dry box along with a can of desiccant and a LiPo battery.

The solar panel has a view through the case lid, and the buoy is kept upright by a long PVC boom on the bottom of the case. Two versions have been built and launched so far; alas, the Pacific buoy was lost shortly after it was launched. But the Atlantic buoy picked up the Gulf Stream and has been drifting slowly toward Europe since last summer, sending back telemetry. A future version aims to incorporate an Automatic Identification System (AIS) receiver, presumably to report the signals of AIS transponders on nearby ships as they pass.

We like the attention to detail as well as the low cost of this build. It’s a project that’s well within reach of a STEM program, akin to the many high-altitude DIY balloon projects we’ve featured before.

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