Please take a moment to introduce yourself. Share as much as you feel comfortable but here are a few questions to get you started:
Hi everyone. My name is Zack.
I’m an Engineer with Sofar. My work-life revolves mainly around underwater technology, start-ups, open-hardware, and citizen science.
I’m located in San Francisco CA
I really am excited about seeing what everyone is going to build but I am most excited about low-cost long-dwell sensors and what that might mean to conservation.
I would be in Life Aquatic…and would like to be intern #2 because I know how to make a Campari Soda but am not responsible enough for my own Glock.
Looking forward to hearing from everyone else!
Hi everyone! I’m Tosca. I work with Sofar Ocean’s government customers. I’m not an engineer myself but I love learning about marine technologies. I’m also passionate about ocean conservation. You’ll mostly find me lurking! I’m really excited to see what everyone is building. I’m located in Arlington, VA.
Hey there Tosca! I’m glad you decided to join the Bristlemouth forum. I’m sure there are going to be some exciting projects coming from public and private partnerships. Can’t wait to see some of those show up in the community section!
~Z
Hello world! Eric Stackpole here. I’m stoked to see this forum getting started! I’ve been excited about Bristlemouth for a very long time and I can’t wait to start building things with it. I started OpenROV just over a decade ago with the intention of democratizing ocean exploration, and I think Bristlemouth has tremendous potential to continue fueling that effort by making it easier to build and integrate marine technology. I’ve already got a few designs for modular devices that use Bristlemouth in mind, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what others come up with as well.
Welcome, Eric! I can’t wait to see what you build with Bristlemouth.
I heard rumors that you may be doing modular Bristlemouth components for AUV/ASVs as a proof of concept–if you are looking to show those off or want to maybe find some collaborators please post those to Projects!
Z
Hi there - my name is Alec im from Porthleven in Cornwall - a lovely part of the UK and probably one of the most photographed places in an Atlantic storm. Im passionate about technology and weather/sur forecasting.
Hoping to build a European surf forecasting website swellcloud.co.uk that uses traditional models and adding a layer of additional accuracy by using live sensors.
I would most like to be in Big Wednesday or Crystal Voyager
Cheers
Alec
Hey there Alec! Welcome.
Looking forward to learning more about Swellcloud! Count me out for Big Wednesday though! Too heavy for me!
Zack
Hi I’m David, I work on wireless environmental sensors and chip design, with plenty of it going underwater. I’m in Portland OR and starting to design a string of smart hydrophones that will hopefully not require a huge bundle of cables!
Welcome, David! We’re always interested in new sensors. If you have any information you’d like to share about them please don’t be shy about posting an intro topic on Projects …
Welcome!
Z
Hi, I’m Ron.
I’m a retired electrical engineer who spent most of my working career wrangling computer software. My connection and interest to what you folks are doing is a bit weird, but bear with me for a second… 
I live outside of Chicago, Illinois. No oceans nearby, but we’ve got a few pretty big and deep lakes. At various points in my working career, I worked on protocols for payment systems. That provides, I guess, a bit of a connection to Bristlemouth and its stack. I’ve had an interest in ROVs for several years now, nothing professional, just an interest. I learned several years back that nobody had been to the bottom of Lake Michigan since about 1985. That got me to thinking about constructing a small ROV to get down there. At almost 1,000 deep, it’s an interesting challenge. Since I retired, I’ve been a volunteer in the physics department of a small local university. One of the kind of cool things about our small physics department is that some of our students get the opportunity to work on projects that they normally wouldn’t get to until grad school. Once they heard about my ROV project, it ended up becoming a student research project that will probably be starting up this fall. The idea has evolved into fabricating some ROVs so that the students can get that practical experience, but also to work on an idea that is something akin to “cubesats” in the space program, that is, small ROVs that are almost like utility vehicles with the ability to easy swap out components as needed, and at a relatively low cost. I had followed OpenROV a few years ago, kind of lost track of it. Just today, working on an outline for this fall’s project, I looked again at OpenROV. I’m not sure exactly what’s going on with it at this point, but it led me to Sofar, which led me to Bristlemouth, and here I am.
I might be in the completely wrong place, and if so, I apologize and will slink away in embarrassment. But, there might be some synergies here between my/our project as well as my previous work on a diverse team building protocols for new systems, and what you folks are working on. Then again, I might just be cranky old fart who should stay out of the way of the youngsters.
Anyway, that’s my story. I’m going to dig into whatever information I can find here until somebody tells me to go away. I’ll try to be more brief in the future (but I probably won’t succeed).
Ron
Hello all!
I’m Samuel and I got to know Bristlemouth through the sharing session at ROS-by-the-bay! I have been dabbling in robotics since 2015, started off with building autonomous marine vehicles and now I’m working on automating large construction vehicles at Sunnyvale, CA!
I generally focus on developing & validating autonomy algorithms, but also work on hardware integration on the robots themselves since I like to be hands on!
Bristlemouth is pretty new to me, but I understood the problems with hardware bring-up in the marine ecosystem. Being able to “plug & play” along with drivers could help speed up developments and bring in more people to the marine ecosystem! I hope to be part of this, and also find some use for my free time after work 
side note: I would probably want to be Winnie the Pooh, just a happy-go-lucky person, doing what I enjoy!
Hello! I’m David Lang.
I’ve worked on/at OpenROV and Sofar Ocean over the years. Nowadays running the Experiment Foundation funding scientists.
I’m based in Seattle, soon to be Bay Area.
I’m most excited to see what folks are building here!
Hey everyone, great to “e-meet” you. I am Brian Helmuth and I serve as lead science advisor for the Proteus Ocean Group, a project launched by Fabien Cousteau to build the “international space station of the sea floor” (www.proteusoceangroup.org). I’m also a Professor at Northeastern University in Boston. I’m a marine scientist, and much of my work focuses on how we couple high temporal and spatial resolution monitoring of the environment, with process-based experiments to inform marine conservation. I’m also a huge proponent of public engagement, which fits well with the Proteus vision of (re)engaging the world in the vital importance of the ocean! Bristlemouth tech would be a perfect fit for work that we have going on already at the Proteus site on the reefs of Curaçao, both for scientific data collection and also to share those data with multiple publics. It sounds trite, but if I could be in any movie, it would be in Jacques Cousteau’s World Without Sun, living in Conshelf on the ocean floor!
It’s great to hear from you, @Rongee! Oh man- seeing what’s down at 1000’ in Lake Michigan would be amazing. You’re certainly in the right place to talk about it.
Although Bristlemouth has just launched and there are limited numbers of compatible modules so far, the thing that really excites me about it is that it can allow systems to be modular like you describe. Before I got into underwater stuff, I worked on micro satellites, and I remember how revolutionary the CubeSat standard was for the industry. Certainly, the hope is that Bristlemouth will help democratize access to underwater research in the same way.
If you haven’t seen it already, I made a semi-functional example of an AUV using this architecture, and I think it would be very possible to make an ROV using basically the same components, just configured differently. This would also be a great way for students to experiment with building underwater vehicles and equipment since the parts would basically go together like Lego. I’m already working on some other Bristlemouth modules so it would be great to trade notes on what types of devices you’d like to see first. I have a mechanical engineering background, so with you EE skills, I imagine we might be able to help each other! Thanks for the post, and excited to learn more about what you’re interested in.
It’s great to see you here, @samuel-ongzx ! I’m hoping we’ll have some time to put together a Bristlemouth hackathon here in the Bay Area in the next month or two. If that happens, you should defiantly come!
Welcome @Rongee! Sounds like you are in good company here! Welcome. I look forward to seeing some of your work on the Projects page.
Z