Engineering students develop a coral reef monitoring system

Matt Rogers · 06-01-2005, 11:07 PM

From the 3reef Ocean News -

Quote:

Engineering students develop a coral reef monitoring system

By Françoise Chanut

Five senior engineering students at UCSC are trying to push the limits of low-power wireless transmission to facilitate the monitoring of remote natural environments.

The apparatus they are building will track conditions on coral reefs in distant locations and beam information back in real time to a land-based station.

http://currents.ucsc.edu/04-05/05-30/project.asp

Too cool!

mmakay · 06-02-2005, 07:36 AM

Very cool indeed!

skennelly · 06-02-2005, 07:45 AM

That is cool! I would like to have something like that for my reef tank. I often think about building a similar system for my tank, but I would make it real-time internet based for remote viewing. The software part of it would be relatively easy to create, but not sure about finding the probes for various tanks levels....calcium, ph, temp ect... I wonder if I could buy probes for say a neptune controller and adapt them to hardware I build.

S

m_lacom99 · 06-02-2005, 09:21 AM

Well skennelly i was thinking about something in that matter to.. There are already monitors and probes that exist that work on X10 technologies and you can input that in a computer via RS232. So all you would need is the software to interpret the data and do what you want with it. If im not mistaking Reefcon PRO already does that. Pretty cool.

Marc.

P.S If you ever decide to give it a try let me know, ill give you a hand. Programmer here

skennelly · 06-02-2005, 11:50 AM

Thanks Marc, I'm also a programmer so that part would be the least of my worries. Getting the initial equipment would be my biggest problem.

Sean

m_lacom99 · 06-02-2005, 11:52 AM

I know a couple places where they sell the equipment but its very expensive... a big CHA CHING...

Marc.

skennelly · 06-02-2005, 02:07 PM

Why does money have to get in our way all the time!

Not practical for me if its going to cost me an arm and a leg I'm getting married this September and that's draining my reef tank funds down dramatically since my fiance and I are paying for it ourselves.

But we are going to Maui for the honeymoon so I'll really get to view the reefs when we snorkel.....I think the resort we are staying at offers free SCUBA lessons so I might go for that.

S