The idea for this project was inspired by a Hackaday Project (https://hackaday.io/project/20458-osug-open-source-underwater-glider) from Alex Williams which managed to win the Hackaday price of the year 2017. He did an amazing job in my opinion but my aim is to take this idea one step further and create a blueprint for a glider where students and hobbyists from all over the world can use in order to explore and study down to a 200m (and hopefully at a later stage 1000m) of water autonomously for for weeks or even months at a time without using an expensive commercial glider.
My initial idea is that I would use GitHub for sharing files, ReadTheDocs for sharing the background knowledge and Hackaday to log the build. These are simply the services I found that do what I want, but I am open to any other suggestions.
Please feel free to write me about your suggestions and if you want to join this effort, at ehs.abdi@gmail.com
Here is the ReadTheDocs page: https://open-source-glider.rtfd.io
Hackaday page: https://hackaday.io/project/196850-open-source-glider
I am an electronics engineer who has been working with commercial underwater gliders since 2015 and I find them absolutely fascinating and fun! I am by no means an expert in anything! My goal is to transfer what I have learned during this time to the average hobbyist or student and hopefully assist in gathering more data from our oceans, because I am a believer in citizen science and I think once the gliders are accessible tool to general public, we will see a transformation in ocean data like we've never seen before. However, this is no simple task! Oceans are extremely rough environments. This is why a lot of money and time has been invested in developing all the current commercial units in use and therefore their price point is kind of fair from their perspective. But companies like BlueRobotics have proven that it is possible to create reliable and affordable marine instruments, if you are not scared of an open-source design. My hope is that more and more experts join and contribute to this project to create a robust and affordable open-source underwater glider.
I will probably be making a lot of wrong assumptions and flat out mistakes in trying to explain everything there is about gliders and trying to figure out how to build one from scratch! So please do help me! If there is a subject where you have more knowledge about, please correct me and enrich the community.