Ever since I was in the Coast Guard, I have had a love/hate relationship with the water. I love the water and the natural beauty that comes with living near the water. The hate part has to do with people and their seemingly inability to take care of the environment. Abandoned boats and barges litter the waterways, many still containing hazardous materials such as fuel, oil, and antifreeze which could leak into the surrounding water.
According to NOAA's website " Removing abandoned and derelict vessels is often complicated and expensive. Some vessels are located in hard-to-reach areas, requiring large, specialized equipment for recovery and transportation. The wreckage may last for many years, breaking apart and creating widespread debris that threatens marine and coastal resources. Assessing, removing, and disposing of these vessels also requires significant financial and technical resources, and the laws around these vessels can be different across states. These complications can make abandoned and derelict vessels a difficult problem to address". With limited funding and resources available, deciding which of these vessels to remove and dispose of needs to be a calculated decision based upon the condition of the vessel and location. By placing a small stability monitoring sensor on board the vessels, this data could be used to aid in determining which vessels would need to be removed first.
Currently I am using a few different sensors, one is the Heltec's Capsule with 9 dof sesor, the other is a Heltec Dev board with Seeed Grove 9dof sensor. Both are utilizing the Helium network to transmit data. The Capsule comes in a small waterproof capsule with attached solar panel. But I have not had much success getting the solar panel to actually recharge the battery. Mounting of the sensor Cubecell capsule uses a mop holder with command strips to affix to the vessel. The other currently uses 1.25" PVC pipe with two caps and a magnetic antenna base to mount but just about any waterproof enclosure should be able to work.
While this vessel is not derelict it does remotely monitor the vessels stability.
In the future, each sensor will have a qr code that when adding to Tago.io will utilize the cell phone GPS to add the location of the vessel to the to the tracking dashboard. The dashboard gives an easy to read current position as well as a historical tracking. Alerts can easily be set up in Tago.io uses the actions section.
Comments