My friend is an engineer and an avid kayaker in florida rivers. He wants some kind of mission while he goes around kayaking. He's a computer vision expert and one of his ideas is an array of gopros or lidar on the bottom and top to scan the river beds. He's also open to arming his kayak with sensors of whatever kind. Is there something that would be useful to have on such a kayak that people could do with such data? Let me know!
21 March 2025 12:55pm
Love this idea! I have spent some time thinking about similar things and have built some rather expensive (~ $20K) pH and oxygen sensors to use on paddlecraft as well as much less expensive (~ $500) simpler devices for geolocated temperature measurement. Neither of these is readily available, but I do have a couple ideas for your friend if he is up for a little reading and exploring options:
- Check out the Testing the Waters site and paper (links below). Eric Compas and others used Atlas Scientific water quality instrumentation on a kayak.
- SciStarter.org might have some good ideas for kayak-based participatory science, even with just a mobile phone.
- Check out Blue Robotics hardware and forums (one example below). They make all sorts of cool fully packaged and OEM hardware for this sort of thing. I once saw a nice DIY surfboard + Blue Robotics echosounder project (can't find the link at the moment—sorry) which would be easy to adapt to kayaking.
Happy to chat more if any of these leads or related stuff is of interest (more of my contact info available at coast-lab.org).
Help im a noob but I work with seabed survey - Blue Robotics Products - Blue Robotics Community Forums
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Phil Bresnahan