MIT Sea Grant Project - Circuit and Software for Variation of a Lagrangian Drifter
MIT Sea Grant is developing a Lagrangian drifting vehicle equipped with sensors to measure some water parameters to support the lab’s research in ocean acidification. Key to the operation of this vehicle is a reliable communications link between the drifter and the lab. This will primarily involve the vehicle transmitting its water quality data (pH, RTD, EC, DO), its position (GPS) within Massachusetts Bay (the operating arena) and its motion and orientation data (IMU). Therefore, a satellite and wireless communications system was developed for the drifter. The former is established through the Iridium satellite constellation. More specifically, the module implemented was the “RockBLOCK 9603” which uses Iridium Short-Burst Data (SBD). The latter, uses the LoRaWAN protocol (unlicensed radio spectrum to enable low power, wide area communication) and is the “Feather 32u4 with LoRa module” microcontroller (915 MHz). Through satellite, the drifter posts a message containing the water quality data collected from the drifter’s sensors, the location and some information from the IMU to the selected email accounts and to a web page. Through wireless communications, the drifter is able to post a link to Google Maps to a web page with its location and is able to interact with the user. Consequently, we can ask the drifter about its location and/or any of its water quality data at any time and we will get a response with the value that was last recorded from the drifter’s corresponding sensor. The drifter also stores all the data gathered in an SD card. For more details, please take a look at the source-code repository (repository is on my GitHub page and a link to it can be found on the Portfolio page of this website under the corresponding project). Slideshow Gallery
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 Feather 32u4 with LoRa module.JPG)
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