Securing a backup bungee to the anchor plate.

I know I said I was going to keep the ocean sensors in service till they croaked, but after more than two years of operation I’ve decided to retire the two beta units to our bookshelf museum. B3 & B4 were the last loggers in our fleet based on the Tinyduino platform (and the guys back in Ohio deserve some credit for helping us get the project off the ground!)  The clincher on this decision was the practical issue of still being able to do a full calibration on those sensors, so I can apply that to all that wonderful flow data we’ve gathered from Akumal Bay over the last 14 months.  And you run a risk of loosing your loggers every time you deploy in a high energy environment.

Four generations of flow sensors, spanning two years of development. Beta4 was literally the fourth data logger I ever made, and the first to run for a significant length of time.

These replacements also bring all of the ocean units into the same generation of Rocket Ultra based builds,  so they should all deliver a year of operation before they need servicing. Much as I loved the Tinyduinos, I never got them down into the 0.15mA sleep currents that I now see the MCP1700 regulator  boards delivering.  As the folks at CEA keep pushing them further out onto the reef,  it’s getting more expensive to deploy & retrieve them, so we need all the run time we can get.

The new locations also mean I can’t just pop in and exchange them on the way to the airport… like I am doing today…

Addendum:
Akumal was the last stop on a busy trip that saw us hopping all over the peninsula to visit colleagues while staying in towns from Tulum to Chiquila.  You see allot of beautiful things outside the tourist strip that never end up in the brochures, but you never quite escape the influence that radiates from that heaving mass of transient humanity.

I think this is reflected in the work of the local artists:

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