Page 25: of Marine Technology Magazine (March 2023)

wirelessly through the water without needing the tether. That’s ply chain was constrained.

something we just launched and are now pushing forward.”

Underwater Optical Comms

From Idea to Prototype to Product … Quickly As is well understood, the big challenge underwater is that

Like many tech start-ups, Hydromea started small, with the radio waves don’t penetrate through water. “So, that means trio of Schill, Barr, and eventually also Igor Martin, the com- there is no GPS, there’s no 3G, 4G, no Wi-Fi, and the indus- pany’s current CEO. As anyone at any tech start-up can at- try has so far relied on acoustic communication, which works test, the mantra was ‘do everything ourselves’, from software, great for a lot of applications, but it has a big limitation in to the electronics, to building the hardware, machining, as- terms of bandwidth,” said Schill.

sembling, business development, and fundraising … the list Lack of bandwith means you cannot get an HD video stream goes on. “It was a lot on our plate, and I used to joke that through acoustics, and also the latency is quite high, he said. we had more products than employees, but that has certainly Enter Hydromea’s underwater optical communication, which changed,” said Schill. “The team has grown and things are uses pulses of blue light, which according to Schill gives you going forward really well, but at the same time I think is this the high bandwidth and very low latency. “It allows you to can-do attitude that we can build, develop and prototype ev- get a 10-megabit HD video stream in real time at very high erything in-house. We’re proud that we have a well-equipped quality to the operator, and also the control signals from the workshop and the know-how to very quickly go from idea to operator back to the drone with millisecond latency so that prototype to product, because we can machine and 3D print you don’t have that lag while you control it,” said Schill.

and solder everything in our workshop, and also make the ini- A side effect of that high bandwidth is also a lot more power tial quantities for early adopters” before taking the product to ef? cient. “Especially for battery powered devices, you can a mainstream production line, which is outsourced. The abil- transmit a thousand times more data with the same energy that ity to go from design to prototype to product in-house was you need from the battery simply because it is so much faster,” particularly instrumental during the pandemic, when the sup- said Schill. “That’s a great bene? t to equip battery powered www.marinetechnologynews.com 25

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