@estackpole I appreciate your enthusiasm—it truly shines—and all your hard work. Thank you for your thoughtful response and consideration. I am now quite optimistic about the technical feasibility of this idea. To address your considerations, let me be more specific about the proposal:
I suggest a development pipeline that progresses through increasing levels of risk and complexity. We would start with the low technical risk integration on the SDSL system (“networked cage on a cable”), then advance to Jason ROV (“networked robot on a cable”), followed by SENTRY AUV (“Autonomous Robot”), and finally tackle the platform with the strictest requirements—the ALVIN HOV with people on board.
Please see the diagram below showing a proposed SDSL BM integration. This diagram is derived from Figure 1 in the SDSL documentation.
Regarding your comments on mote pressure tolerance, all the embedded electronics would be housed in a hermetically sealed pressure vessel at 1 atm, so nothing innovative there. The core challenge of this integration would be implementing the BM sockets as penetrators on the SDSL end cap. Conveniently, the SDSL system runs on a 24Vdc deep-sea battery—matching the bus voltage of BM.
We need to fabricate a “Mote to Ethernet Adapter.” @zack_j do you know if anyone has already done this or at least considered it?
The biggest hole I see here is a classic chicken/egg dilemma. If we build an interface, where is the deep-sea BM tool? Wait… I have an idea - @NickRaymomd could we fit PiCam into a MISO GoPro housing and BM enable it?
So much fun! and yes WHOI pressure test facility is a awesome resource and one of the many reason why WHOI-DSL collaboration seems like a great fit. My guess is this is the vessel you were talking about…
Image taken from:
SOLARIS, WHOI pressure test facility - ALIVIN certifying SOLARIS a deep sea reactive oxygen instrument.
@estackpole Would you be willing to go into a little more detail on the mechanical implementation of the socket you used for your pressure testing? Is it feasible to machine that into these SDSL end caps? How would you suggest going about that?