Fontaine Maru is not in Sunnyvale

Only its brain is :-)  we swapped out the command-and-control unit and shipped it back to Sunnyvale.  Fontaine is happily in Hawaii running with a transplanted brain.  The old brain is being worked on in Sunnyvale.  The software generating the data that goes into ERDDAP currently doesn’t track changes in vehicle ID numbers (we currently use the IMEI number from the Iridium modem).  Yet another thing on my to-do list   :-)

navytim asked: What is the GPS update rate for the gliders? Does it vary or do you keep a steady schedule? What do you use to monitor the weather patterns that the gliders may encounter? Is the speed data that you get from the gilders an average or an instantaneous speed? The data is great, keep it up!

The GPS sensor updates every 5 seconds, but we only send back GPS coordinates every 5 minutes, this can be reduced if we’re trying to conserve power or increased if we want to track the gliders more closely. 

We use satellite data to monitor weather patterns but this generally doesn’t affect our course since we want to test the vehicles’ abilities in a variety of sea-states and weather conditions. 

The speed data is a one minute average and the latest value is reported.

Glad you’re enjoying the data! Have you considered using your research and analysis to enter the PacX Challenge Prize for six months of free Wave Glider time and a $50k sponsorship from BP?

-DM

Windows App for Tracking PacX Data

As I mentioned earlier, a super fan of ours created an HP Touchpad app for the PacX data, after a few weeks of working on it he successfully ported it over to Windows! Go ahead and visit his website to check it out for yourself. 

eakmetoc asked: I heard about this via and article my Mom sent me from the WSJ. I teach Oceanography for the University of Phoenix and formerly I was an Oceanographer for the Navy. I am SO excited about this experiment. I live in Guam so if you or your team ever find the need to come this way please let me know I'd be happy to be the local on the ground to help you out. .... do you have a fan page on Facebook? I'd like to share this with my friends and share the info on the Navy METOC FB page!

We’re really pleased that you’re excited.  One of the points of the whole exercise is to get students everywhere excited by the ocean.  Good dense data, freely available, and a (slow) race with sharks.  Even without the fancy instruments, students can find all sorts of interesting facts about ocean currents.

On twitter we’re @liquidrinc.  Our Facebook page is liquid robotics.  And we’re on LinkedIn.  They don’t get updated as often as they ought to.  This blog gets the most attention.

polarjacksw asked: When looking on your screenshot of your Robot Visualizer, we can see "Papa Mau", the missing glider, not far from "Piccard Maru" with a date 8 March (after the end of data available from iridium). Is that meaning you are able to continue to follow the "Papa Mau" glider with GPS data and no iridium emission ? How did you collect data ? Did you plan to rescue also this glider ?

[ I apologize for this and the following entries being somewhat out of order, I’m just catching up on a backlog of questions ]   Iridium Inc “reprovisioned” the modem unexpectedly, which mucked up the packet format.  We figured out what was wrong and the modern software (the visualizer) knows how to compensate for the mess-up.  The infrastructure currently feeding ERDDAP doesn’t have this fix (yet).  For various reasons we could receive but not send :-( so it was blindly following it’s original instructions which didn’t compensate for high currents east of Hawaii.  It wasn’t able to overpower the currents, so it got pushed towards Maui, where we had to pick it up.

polarjacksw asked: What's happening for the Piccard Maru Wave Glider ? Since the 5th of March, the ruddercount seems locked, the glider goes to North even with a desired heading is South and Pressure Sensor , Submarine Temperature and Heading are 0 !!! Something is broken ?

Shark attack  :-)

polarjacksw asked: For the "PowerStatus" dataset, there is a strange thing about "Solar1" & "Solar2" (milliwatts) since the 2012-02-11. A couple of values are negative and lower than -32000 during the daylight (ex: Fontaine Maru @ 2012-02-11T21:51:42Z Solar1=12917.0, @ 2012-02-11T22:51:42Z Solar1=-32009.0 and @2012-02-11T23:51:36Z Solar1=28216.0). When looking the variation, it seems that there is a bad conversion into signed integer instead of unsigned integer (-32009.0 means 33527.0 mW => Two's complement).

yes: my bad.  I’m still working on pushing out regenerated data with some calibration problems fixed.  It’s taking a while since the back end is being almost completely rewritten :-(

Wave Gliders ready for some Aloha

All four Wave Gliders have now reached Hawaii and broke the world record! Some made it in a more exciting fashion than others, so it’s time for them to get a little spa treatment while in Hawaii.

Fontaine and Benjamin arrived under their own steam at our test area off the Big Island near Kona, and Ben was greeted with some fanfare from the local press.

Piccard Maru got pretty close but ran into a bit of a steering issue that we’re still diagnosing. We sent the Noha Loa to visit it, and it’s back to shore now.

Papa Mau got in a funny state with its communications after Iridium accidentally reconfigured the data feed. Our coders were able to hand-build a command and regain communications, but we were awfully close to Maui so we opted to meet it with a boat.

It looks like all the gliders took a bit of a beating from the very rough winter weather (a tornado touched down in Oahu this week, if you haven’t heard.)  Despite all the problems, all four Wave Gliders have made it to the Aloha State where we’re getting ready to send them to Japan and Australia after a bit of R&R!