The Drifting Buoy Project currently has three buoys drifting in the North Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific. The buoys measure surface location, speed, direction, water temperature and light.
The buoys are inexpensive to build relative to the $2,000 commercial models available on the market. They use off the shelf components including an Iridium modem, GPS receiver, Arduino Trinket Pro 5V from Adafruit and one of our saltwater worthy solar panels. The waterproof solar panels, encapsulated in urethane, have been deployed in a range of marine applications.
Here’s the V3 version:
Buoy sends messages at pre-prescribed times via Iridium Short Burst Data (SBD) service are plotted on Google.
Here’s a deployment of one of the buoys off of Hawaii that shows the types of waves and currents the buoys are exposed to.
Watch the video of Wayne’s presentation at Maker Faire NYC 2017.
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