The Bristlemouth Pioneer Program has been allowing people to experiment with integrating their own devices with Bristlemouth to work with the Spotter Smart Mooring system, but I’d like to start creating devices that support Bristlemouth natively. I’m a big fan of making marine devices that are simple and robust, and Bristlemouth sockets make it possible to explore design concepts that are much more streamlined.
I’m particularly interested in developing systems that can be used in underwater vehicles like ROVs and AUVs, so the first system I’d like to build is a Bristlemouth Depth/IMU sensor.
This system would incorporate a depth sensor that measures pressure and temperature and uses that information to determine water depth, and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) that has a compass, gyro, and accelerometer for understanding orientation and motion. These two types of sensors are core to just about any underwater navigation system, so having a module that measures both of these things well in a simple, well-built package that talks Bristlemouth seems like a great project to start with. The plan is to design my own PCB that will mate directly with a Bristlemouth Mote (link to schematic PDF at bottom of “Downloads” section, entitled “Bristlemouth_Mote_Schematic.pdf”) using the mezzanine connector the Mote has, and I’ll pot that assembly into a custom machined housing. Both sensors I’d like to use (the Keller PA7LD pressure sensor and BNO085 IMU) communicate with I2C, so electrical and software development for the design should be relatively straight forward.
I’m a mechanical engineer, so designing the physical components of this system shouldn’t be to much trouble for me, however I could use some help with the electrical PCB and software design parts of this effort. I’m very happy to share all of my work as open source, so if anyone with these other EE or SW skills would like to help, we’ll be creating something anyone can use or build for themselves.
Please let me know if you’d like to help with this or any other Native Bristlemouth module designs!