OpenWave – designing an ocean wave measurement device
Shane Ormonde is looking to revive the OpenWave concept:
The short version of the project is this: Ocean wave sensors are placed on ocean data buoys to measure wave height and direction. The hardware these sensors use is very inexpensive. The PCB with all the parts assembled costs around 50 euros depending on volume of the order.
So far I’ve got a borrowed Adafruit ESP32-S2 TFT Feather board hooked up to a BNO055. I’ve got code working that can record linear acceleration at a set sample rate and duration. This then gets saved to a file on the ESP32 flash that I can then access by connecting it to my computer via USB. I’ve got about 2MB of flash which with my sample size should let me sample at 0.2ish Hz for around 15-20 minutes which is just what I want.
If you are going out on a boat, you want to know if the waves are too high or not. Significant wave height is a good indication of how high the waves are, so the sensor would have some utility with just this measurement alone. To really compete with actual commercial wave data sensors I will need direction data also.
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