Page 20: of Marine Technology Magazine (March 2023)

OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTRUMENTATION & SENSORS

S S Sofar Ocean’s Spotter Buoy is designed to be low-cost and easy to deploy. Today there are more th t t an 2,500 deployed worldwide, delivering more than 200,000 daily updateson ocean weather.

tangible results. this is the easiest way to plug things together because it has “Way? nder is hyper focused on delivering the best routes a very low-cost waterproof connector, something that’s very and optimization of both waypoint selection and speed. It dif? cult, strangely enough in the marine space.” is optimized to make sure that everybody’s looking at the “That was a big pain point for us because we can’t handle ex- same information, it is on board and onshore, and basically pensive connectors and we certainly can’t wait a while,” said making sure that there is seamless interaction on the same Janssen. “So we built a connector protocol, which is similar to information and that adherence of the best strategy is maxi- USB, not just a connector, but it actually has a modern soft- mized,” said Janssen. ware stack that allows easy integration of components in the marine space. Obviously, it’s waterproof, so it’s basically a

Bristlemouth: Making Connections USB modi? ed to work well for marine applications.”

While the Spotter buoy sits somewhat central to all that Sofar Bristlemouth is an active partnership between the Of? ce of is doing, predictably Janssen and the Sofar team eye an even Naval Research (ONR), DARPA, Sofar Ocean, and Oceankind. bigger prize: a community open hardware interface designed “What we hope to achieve is to not necessarily for us, but to allow cost-effective connectivity across subsea devices and for the community as a whole, for more innovation on sen- platforms, helping to exponentially fast-track the discovery sor development to be unlocked so that we get more low-cost and recovery of data from the ocean. sensors, more low-cost components that are easily scalable to “We’re launching Bristlemouth this year, which is much big- help accelerate ocean exploration and sensing,” said Janssen.

ger than Spotter,” said Janssen, a development that will help Janssen said, importantly, that Bristlemouth will make it eas- to exponentially expand the Spotter platform. “The simplest ier for Sofar Ocean to add new sensors to its Spotter platform. way to think about [Bristlemouth] is it’s a USB for the sea. It’s “Unlocking and accelerating the way in which and the pace basically a community open hardware interface that makes it at which we can integrate new sensors is really one of the incredibly easy to connect things together, not just a sensor main things that we’re going to be focusing on this year on the to a Spotter, but if you want to build an ROV, for example, hardware platform.” 20 March/April 2023

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