1/25/2016

The replacement buoy for Jensen Beach has been prepped and is ready for deployment.  At this point we are waiting for a good weather window for deployment and as soon as we get one the buoy will be restored to service.

1/11/2016

The Jensen Beach buoy has stopped reporting and has actually been over due for its scheduled maintenance.  We will service this buoy as soon as we possibly can.  We are currently working on its replacement and it should be ready in the next week and of course after that we will need a good weather window to perform the service.  We apologize for any inconvenience. 

10/7/2016

The Jensen Beach Buoy is down due to Hurricane Matthew.  We do have a replacement buoy for this location and it will be deployed as soon as possible. Stay tuned for updates.

10/8/2016

The Jensen Beach buoy survived!!! The loss of data during the Hurricane was due to loss of power at the lifeguard shack.  Now that power is back on and the laptop that receives the data from the buoy has been re-booted data is flowing again.  Still this buoy is overdue for maintenance and the wavegage batteries are very low so data may not flow too much longer.  We will swap out buoys as soon as possible.

4/6/2017

It appears we have lost contact with the Jensen Beach buoy.  We have upgraded the alternate buoy to cell phone communications as we will soon lose the shore station (lifeguard building) as it is set to go through renovations in the near future.  This buoy is ready to go and will replace the current buoy as soon as the opportunity arises with a good weather window.

 4/10/2017

We have a boat lined up for the buoy swap but the winds are not forecast to be favorable at all this week but we will continue to monitor the weather and will get out as soon as possible.

4/26/2017

We missed a narrow opportunity today to swap out this buoy.  Unfortunately we could not take advantage of the calm conditions and it looks like the weather will not cooperate for at least another week.

4/27/2017

We managed to sneak out today and get the job done just before the winds started to pick up out of the South.  We swapped out the buoy and the data is streaming back to the web!

 

6/27/2017

We went out to Jensen Beach on Tuesday this week to try to sort out the intermittent communications we have had since switching over the data transmitter from point-to-point RF to cell phone. Swapped out transmitters for one with a bit more diagnostic code to aide in troubleshooting and it looks like we have a damaged data cable from the wavegage to the topside buoy. We hope to get out next week after the holiday and swap out buoys to correct the issue.

7/6/2017

We got out to Jensen Beach and swapped out buoys and data is now streaming back to the website.  The issue was a damaged data cable.   

 

9/10/2017

Hurricane Irma took out the Jensen Beach buoy around 6pm EST on 9/10.  Last reading was 16.3ft at 9s.  Pretty burly but we are still striving to build an inexpensive buoy that will survive through hurricanes, even this close to shore.

9/14/2017

Recovered the remains of the Jensen Beach buoy about 5 miles north of its deployed location.  We will be able to re-use most if not all of what we recovered.  This buoy will be the first to be restored.

9/22/2017

The replacement buoy for Jensen Beach is about 80% complete and expected to be finished by and testing by 9/27.  Once testing is complete we will begin to look for a good enough weather window to re-deploy.  Thanks for your support!

9/29/2017

The Jensen Beach buoy is ready to roll.  We have a boat lined up but now have to wait for a good weather window for deployment.

11/2/2017

We dove on the buoy site to locate the anchor and remains of the buoy and wavegage.  After locating the anchor we secured a surface marker to it so it would be easier to deploy the new buoy.

11/9/2017

We got out today by kayak and deployed the new Jensen Beach buoy.  She is up and running.  Many thanks for your support and patience!

1/13/2018

We abruptly lost communication with this buoy around 11am.

1/17/2018

We have been alerted by a beach goer that this buoy has washed ashore near the House of Refuge.  We recovered the remains and found that it has been completely destroyed as washed over the 'Reef of Death' in front of the House of Refuge.  We have a buoy ready to go that was earmarked for a different location but will be re-directed to Jensen Beach and deployed once we get a suitable weather window for operations.

2/13/2018

We re-deployed the Jensen Beach buoy today.  Great conditions for diving considering the time of year, 71 on the bottom and 10+ ft of viz!  Basically put out a whole new station and recovered the remains of the previous station that were still attached to the anchor.  The wave gauge was fine as expected but we were pleasantly surprised to recover the buoy transmitter as well and it was in good working order.

5/15/2018

This buoy is the new design and we have discovered a design issue which we believe has resulted in a cable failure at the connection point to the buoy.  The fix will require us to remove the buoy to replace the bottom flange which will have a different connector that will relieve the stress on the cable at the buoy.  We have one spare buoy that we will be use to swap out with this buoy to reduce any down time that may occur due to this issue.  Please bear with us and thanks for your support.

6/6/2018

Got out to Jensen Beach today and swapped out buoy and cable.  The cable did fail as expected but the intermittent data issue is still present.  This was not expected so there is another issue contributing to this problem and we will address as soon as possible.

6/12/2018

Got out to Jensen Beach today to try another round of troubleshooting.  We swapped out the cable for a new one with the thought that the cable we removed was a used cable from a previous deployment.  Unfortunately this also did not fully resolve the intermittent data issue.  Next attempt will be to swap out the wavegage and this will be done as soon as possible.  Thanks for your patience!

6/20/2018

We went out to Jensen Beach today and swapped out the buoy and the wavegage in an effort to correct the sporadic data issue.  So far the data looks good!  Great day for diving, water temp was 79F on the bottom and viz was a good 30 feet.  Thanks for your patience and support!

9/5/2018

We have lost communication with the buoy.  We will attempt to resolve the issue as son as we can. 

10/5/2018

Attempted to fix data stream by swapping out buoys.  While there was an issue with this buoy it appears we did not fully solve the issue.

10/10/2018

Second attempt to fix buoy.  We replaced the data cable but that did not solve the issue either.  Very frustrating!

10/27/2018

Third time is the charm, fingers crossed!  We swapped out the whole station and will troubleshoot the old one in the lab.  It is working and lets hope it stays that way!

1/29/2019

We are losing communication with the wavegage from this station.  The buoy is still functioning properly so it  appears to be a failing data cable between wavegage and buoy.

4/11/2019

We got out to the Jensen buoy today and swapped out the whole system.  The old data cable had pulled free from the buoy during the large wave event around 1/27/2019.  We have added an additional float to the mooring line as well as changed the float spacing to relieve tension on the data cable during large events and/or heavy fouling.

4/14/2019

So the data lasted barely 2 days before something went wrong.  It seems that the transmitter has stopped sending messages and this could indicate that the transmitter has reset to factory defaults.  This will result in a baud rate mismatch between the cell modem and the microprocessor and they will not be able to communicate and thus no transmissions.

4/22/2019

Swapped out transmitter today and the data is streaming again.  Have not yet looked at transmitter for troubleshooting.  TX002 was recovered and TX005 was installed in the buoy. TX002 has a history of resetting to factory defaults resulting in lost communications between the cell modem and the microprocessor.

11/26/2019

Swapped out whole buoy station. Hurricane Dorian broke the data cable and exposed a serious unintended consequence of the new mooring line design. That design has been abandoned in favor of a new one that uses a rigid plastic impregnated wire rope that will not stretch and this is intended to keep the data cable from being stretched and thus breaking.

8/17/2020

We got out to Jensen Beach and deployed a new wave station.  The data is now streaming but may be sporadic due to rewrites of 2 pieces of code which are in beta trial.  We had to switch our old method of delivering data from the buoy to the website because of GoDaddy forcing us to switch from their mail server to Office365 mail server.  Our cell modem is not compatible with the Office365 mail server so we had to switch from emailing the data to using TCP sockets to transfer the data.  This required a rewrite of the firmware on the transmitter in the buoy as well as the software on our cloud server that handles the incoming data.  I know enough to be dangerous using TCP sockets and multithreading in Python so the code will be buggy as I don't know what the failure modes will look like until they crop up.  So the long and short of it is that the code on the transmitter and in the cloud are in beta trials and will have to be fixed as bugs appear.  And it seems there is already a bug that I will have to deal with and unfortunately I think it is on the transmitter firmware which will require us to recover at least the transmitter to fix.  Please be patient as we learn and move forward to achieve a better product.

11/4/2020

The LiIon battery inside the transmitter in the buoy has died.  There is an issue with the charging circuit that is preventing the battery from being charged and as a result the battery has finally died.  We have another transmitter that is ready to go and will be swapped with the current one once the ocean calms down enough to make the swap.  This has been an ongoing intermittent issue whose failure mechanism is not yet known. 

11/28/2020

We replaced the transmitter inside the buoy and the data is streaming again.  One of the 2 parallel solar panels was ripped off the buoy, no way to be sure how it happened.  That may have caused a voltage spike on the charge line at the time of destruction resulting in a blown charge sense resistor in the transmitter, this effectively shuts down battery charging. Or, since the cable from the lost solar panel was submerged it could have caused a short on the charge line also resulting in no battery charging.  Regardless of how it went down, the loss of the charge sense resistor mean there is no way for the battery to charge.

 

1/25/2016

The Indialantic buoy was last heard from on 1/10/2016.  While we do have a visual on it we have been unable to get out to it to attempt on site troubleshooting.  We are currently working on a code upgrade for the transmitter which should help us in determining communication issues in the future and once we can get to the buoy we will swap out transmitters to implement the code upgrade.  We appreciate your patience.

12/16/2015

We had a great weather window today and were able to return the Indialantic buoy back to service! 1 foot of viz but other than that everything went well.

12/2/2015

The Indialantic surf buoy was recovered today, we will repair it as soon as possible and return it to service as quickly as we can. Thank you for your patience.

11/25/2015

We lost contact with the Indialantic surf buoy mid-day on 11/24/2015.  The issue is related to the same problem that brought down the Cocoa Beach buoy.  We will recover the Indialantic buoy at the next available opportunity, repair it and return it to service as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience.

10/7/2016

The Indialantic buoy survived! We went to pay our last respects as soon as we got back beachside from the evacuation and there it was just sitting out there looking pretty. But it did stop transmitting data due to Hurricane Matthew.  This buoy will be recovered and repaired as soon as possible.  Stay tuned for updates.

10/24/2016

Finally had good enough ocean conditions to get the kayak out to assess the damage to the Indialantic buoy and try to retrieve the transmitter.  Fortunately the only physical damage was to the antenna mast.  The antenna mast had broken off stopping the data transmission and caused the buoy to get flooded.  The transmitter is inside a waterproof housing so it is perfectly fine and the battery was fully charged so the solar panels were still functioning as well.  The last transmission from the buoy was at 10/6/2016 23:00 EDT at Hs = 12.5 ft and Tp = 9.1 s.  The processed data is also stored on the transmitter as a back up and we had hoped to get all the data from the storm off of it but unfortunately the flooding compromised the portion of the data cable inside the buoy.  There are a couple of wiring splices inside the buoy that are only splash proof and being submerged in sea water allowed water ingress and has caused intermittent connection.  We did get 3 more data points during the storm with the last reading at 10/7/2016 04:30 EDT with Hs = 18.7 ft and Tp = 10.7 s! We also had intermittent data up until today so we know the wavegage is also still working and collecting data.  We replaced the broken antenna mast with a dummy antenna mast to keep anything else from getting in and hopefully keep this buoy afloat until we can swap it out with a new buoy.  Once we recover it we will also recover the wavegage and get all the data from Hurricane Matthew. Stay tuned as we will publish all the storm data once recovered.

11/13/2016

The Indialantic Buoy has been built and is about to enter the full system test period.  Once testing is complete in about a week we will begin to look for a suitable weather window to return it to service.

11/19/2016

The Indialantic Buoy has been swapped out and data is now streaming to the website.  Great conditions and we managed to do this by kayak. Waves were about 1.5ft, water temperature about 72 and almost 10 ft of viz and this is November.

3/30/2017

We went out to do maintenance on the Indialantic buoy today but discovered an issue with the transmitter that has forced us to take this buoy down for additional maintenance.  The issue should be fixed in the next few days but we will need a good weather window to get back on the water to finish the maintenance.

4/2/2017

The communication issue that the Indialantic buoy was experiencing after maintenance has sorted itself out and appears to be working fine with full data return.  We will continue to monitor in case the issue reappears.

4/26/2017

Weather and waves are still hampering our efforts to restore this buoy to operational status.  We will get to it as soon as conditions become favorable to get out to it in a kayak.

5/10/2017

We got some good conditions and attempted an in-situ repair that did not work.  We replaced the data cable from the wavegauge to the buoy but this did not resolve the issue.  We tried resetting the transmitter but to no avail.  We are working on the next attempt which will be to replace just the surface buoy.  As with replacing the data cable in-situ we have never swapped just the surface buoy before so this is also an experiment.  Sorry for the down time and we expect to make the next attempt in late May.

6/11/2017

We finally sorted out the issue with the Indialantic buoy.  It turns out that during one previous attempt to fix we had a faulty data cable and then on the next attempt we swapped out the cable and wavegauge but unfortunately we did not realize the wavegauge was set up for full-duplex communication while the buoy is set up for half-duplex communication.  So they could not talk to each other.  But we made the corrections and now have data streaming once again!

9/10/2017

Hurricane Irma took out the Indialantic buoy around 10pm EST on 9/10.  Last reading was 16ft at 12s.  Pretty burly but we are still striving to build an inexpensive buoy that will survive through hurricanes, even this close to shore.

9/13/2017

Recovered the remains of the Indialantic buoy today.  The buoy washed ashore about 4 miles north of its deployed location.  This buoy will be returned to service as soon as we can get to it.

11/1/2017

Ocean conditions good enough to get out by kayak to recover the wavegage.  We had 4+ ft of visibility which is incredible for November. Set surface marker to make it easier for deployment of next buoy.

12/5/2017

Had good enough conditions to get out by kayak today and deploy the new Indialantic buoy.  Unfortunately the surface marker we set on 11/1 had broke loose so  we had to locate the station first but we managed to drop in right on top of it without having to do a zero visibility search for it! 

2/8/2018

We got out to the Indialantic buoy and did some in-situ maintenance to get this buoy working again.  We replaced the data cable between the wave gauge on the bottom and the buoy.  The old data cable got compromised but as yet we don't know why.

3/18/2018

Went out to the Indialantic buoy today and swapped out wavegages.  The pressure sensor offset began drifting high so we had to replace the wavegage.  Great conditions for work, flat, water temperature about 68F and 2-3ft of viz.

6/4/2018

Swapped out buoy and wavegage at Indialantic.  Wavegage pressure sensor was drifting causing artifically high water levels.  The new buoy design has a design flaw at the bulkhead connector where the data cable plug into.  This causes to much stress on the mating end of the data cable from rocking and rolling 24-7 leading to premature failure.  Viz was great at 10 plus feet and bottom temp at 75. 

12/2/2018

The pressure sensor has failed and all associated data both waves and water level are not valid.  The sensor has been slowly failing for about 2 weeks now but we are currently out of the country and will address this issue upon our return at the earliest opportunity.

12/17/2018

We got out to the Indialantic buoy today and swapped out the wavegage.  Miserable conditions, viz at 1-2ft and water temp top to bottom was 66F.  The data is now back online.

1/29/2019

We lost communication with the wavegage from this station.  The buoy is still functioning properly so it  appears to be a failed data cable between wavegage and buoy.

5/30/2019

Swapped out the whole system today.  Another episode of broken data cable. Viz was great at about 10ft and bottom temp was a refreshing 73F.  G075 in and G067 out.  TX007 out and TX004 in.

8/30/2020

After a very long down time we finally rolled out our latest wave measuring technology buoy at Indialantic.  This buoy uses an inertial measurement sensor to measure the waves at the surface rather than at the bottom like the pressure sensor based system.  This eliminates the wavegage at the bottom and more importantly the data cable that connects the wavegage to the buoy which has historically been the weak link in the system.  This buoy is on it's first beta trail and will remain in the water as long as the battery lasts and/or the data is still good.  This sensor was hacked into the existing buoy transmitter for the proof-of-concept beta trial and as a result greatly increased the power requirements for the transmitter.  The only way to keep this system running was to increase the charge current for the battery in hopes of it keeping up with the power needs.  Otherwise this would have required a new board design and we decided to get it in the water to learn what we don't know prior to designing a new circuit board for this system.  At the moment this system will only provide wave height, period and surface temperature but eventually it will provide mean wave direction.

5/26/2021

The Indialantic buoy broke loose on 5/24/2021 and washed ashore just north of Canova Beach.  This buoy was deployed on 8/30/2020 and has greatly exceeded our expectations on how long the beta test would last.  

6/19/2021

The Indialantic buoy was placed back in service.  We installed a new mooring line and fixed the surface temperature sensor.  The rubber bungee rope had failed on the old mooring line and a ship worm had burrowed into the hard plastic float ball that was keeping the mooring line taught sinking it to the bottom.  The buoy itself was cleaned and re-deployed.

 

1/25/2016

The Cocoa Beach buoy was last heard from on 1/17/2016.  Due to recent weather we have been unable to get out to it to attempt on site troubleshooting.  We are currently working on a code upgrade for the transmitter which should help us in determining communication issues in the future and once we can get to the buoy we will swap out transmitters to implement the code upgrade.  We appreciate your patience.

12/2/2015

The Cocoa Beach surf buoy was re-deployed today and data is now streaming to the web again.  Thanks again for your patience.

11/25/2015

The Cocoa Beach surf buoy has been repaired and is currently testing in-house.  The buoy will be returned to service at the next available opportunity. Thank you for your patience.

11/22/2015

The Cocoa Beach surf buoy was recovered today due to intermittent communications.  We will work to get this buoy back in the water as soon as possible, we apologize for any inconvenience.

4/30/2016

The Cocoa Beach buoy was successfully re-deployed!

7/18/2016

The Cocoa Beach buoy washed ashore last night in front of the Diplomat condo.  It appears that the mooring line broke at the connection to the chains at the bottom of the buoy.  It is unclear yet how this may have happened.  Thanks to Caity who sent us a Facebook message with photos we saw the buoy was fully intact when it washed ashore.  However, in a most likely helpful attempt to tow it further up the beach someone did major damage to the buoy.  As a result it will take us a bit longer than it should have to get this buoy back in the water.  We will keep you posted on the progress of this buoy.

7/29/2016

The Cocoa Beach buoy has been repaired and returned to service today.  We had to repair the upper portion of the buoy, replace part of the data cable and make a new mooring line.  Water temperature on bottom was a refreshing 75F and viz was less than a foot.  Pretty much had to work by touch.  Thanks for your patience!

5/11/2017

The Cocoa Beach wavegauge was just about out of batteries so we swapped out the wavegauge in-situ and it was a success.  There was no down time associated with this maintenance effort.

9/10/2017

Hurricane Irma took out the Cocoa Beach buoy around 6pm EST on 9/10.  Last reading was 12.1ft at 11s.  Pretty burly but we are still striving to build an inexpensive buoy that will survive through hurricanes, even this close to shore.

9/12/2017

Recovered the remains of the Cocoa Beach buoy today.  The buoy washed ashore just south of its deployed location.  This buoy will be returned to service as soon as we can get to it.

4/25/2018

We have a new buoy ready to be deployed.  We are just waiting on a good weather window that aligns with our boat captain's work schedule. 

5/15/2018

Due to a newly discovered design issue with the new buoy design that imparts too much stress on the cable connection at the buoy, resulting in cable failure, we have re-fit this buoy with a new bottom flange that will relieve the stress on the cable connection.  However this buoy will be used to begin swapping out with the buoys already in the field that are actively experiencing the cable failure issue.  Once all the current buoys have been swapped and re-fit with the new bottom flange we will then deploy the Cocoa Beach buoy.  We apologize for the delay and thank you for your continued support.