No strings attached!

One of the features the deepwater camera aims to have is its ease of deployment. The problem with tethered camera setups is that they create a lot of drag under the water especially with the currents (not to mention that pulling 200+ meters of rope back up is quite tedious). So how will we recover our camera without using a tether? By using a delay-timed release system which will release the attached organic weight after a set amount of time, causing the positively-bouyant camera to float back to the surface for recovery.

 

Burnwire system releasing the weight from the camera system

Yoo-hoo! I'm over here!

 

Looking for the camera | Photo credits to Sally Snow

So how do we find the camera once it pops up on the surface? We are able to find it using a VHF location system attached to the camera. These special tags emit very high frequencies (thus their name) not possible to be picked up by the human ear but can be picked up by radio receivers in the form of *beeps*-- the louder the beeping, the closer we are to the tag, consequently to the camera, allowing for a successful recovery.

 

VHF transmitter communicating to the radio receiver

An opportunity to go deeper

If you haven't seen the project page yet,  we've recently added a stretch goal to our initial budget. The stretch goal is an opportunity for us to elevate the impact of this project. 

In this case, we are raising an additional $700 to procure extra housings for the camera and take the system deeper down to 1,500 meters. You can check out the goal housing here.