Hello everyone!
I’ve got a new window into the subsurface world to share today- keep reading to take a look through it yourself!
ʻamaʻama (striped mullet, Mugil cephalus) swims by this afternoon at the Kaumaui loko wai (fish pond), a truly magical site on the eastern shore of the Big Island of Hawaii.
How it came together
I met Kamala at a local Mega Lab event and was eager to help out with their project: installing a Fathom Ocean Octopus camera (identical to the Kona Reef Mega Lab camera) in the Kaumaui fish pond. The Hui Hoʻoleimaluō organization is truly doing amazing work.
A beautiful day for a Dive. That water is chilly!
Power and packaging
Over 300W of total solar generation is keeping the site running, and producing useful power generation and durability testing data for future Blue Robotics solar offerings. The frame and mount were built and installed by local high school students. It has now survived a hurricane, so they’ve clearly done great work!
The electronics are packaged in a plastic storage container (very prototype vibes), itself inside a much, much larger transmission shipping case. A large battery rests alongside, and a USB drive under a 3D printed cap on an external bulkhead fitting makes pulling recordings physically easy — the Starlink has data limitations, and a friend at MarineSitu (makers of the C3 stereocamera) is playing with this data to see what may be possible with edge AI and auto-creation of “highlight” reels for a given time period.
So far, we’ve discovered that the Victron solar charge controller needs more than a couple amps higher rating than the projected max power - the 75_10 failed, but was replaced with a 75_15 yesterday! This charger communicates with an ESP32 via 3.3V UART - that microcontroller turns the power hungry loads off at night to minimize the hotel load, and reports back to my local HomeAssistant instance to give me direct remote control and logging. The ESP32 runs ESPhome and reaches my network via ZeroTier, which a cheap router can run, making reaching any device connected to it privately and securely easy! Happy to share more details on that low-power software side of things if anyone is curious.
The software, with BlueOS in the driver’s seat
The BlueOS extension is open-source, vibe-coded, functional software that live streams subsea video directly to YouTube. This could be a great starting point for anyone looking to deploy something similar — enter your YouTube live streaming keys, pair it with a compatible AXIS camera, and you’re live immediately. The extension sreams and records at a configurable interval - see the (current) schedule in GMT-10 below.
If you have a different camera, pointing an LLM coding tool like Cursor, Claude Code, or Antigravity at this repository and your camera stream source will likely have things working in no time. If this thread sparks some interest, I’d be happy to make the app more generic and publish it to the store — for now it’s provided as a reference, and testing is easy via manual install (see the readme).
Watch it live
There’s a new live stream every day on the Hui Hoʻoleimaluō YouTube page. Check it out!
