“A brief summary of our smart buoy project. We’ll break down the build into separate posts: electronics, 3D print, and dashboard.
Hi everyone! This is a brief(ish) summary of our smart buoy project. We’ll break down the technical build into separate posts, to explain: electronics, 3D print, and dashboard.
What Does It Do?
The sensors on board the smart buoy enable it to measure: wave height, wave period, wave power, water temperature, air temperature, air pressure, voltage, current usage and GPS location. In an ideal world, it would also have measured wave direction - based on the measurements it was able to take, we were quite close to making it work. However, it turned out to be pretty complicated and it’s actually a massive problem in the actual research community. If there’s anyone out there who can help us out and suggest an effective way to get wave direction measurements, please let us know - we’d love to understand how we could get it to work!
All the data the buoy collects is sent via radio to a base station, which is a Raspberry Pi. We made a dashboard to display them using Vue JS.”