u/MufflerMoose

Hey everyone! I’m working on a low-power autonomous marine buoy. At the moment I’m looking for sensor recommendations from people who've actually deployed environmental hardware.

Stack:

- STM32-class MCU, C++ HAL firmware

- LTE-M (Particle Boron) for telemetry

- SD card logging, DS3231 RTC

- Solar + battery, duty-cycled to stretch power budget

Currently instrumented:

- Water temperature — DS18B20 (1-Wire)

- Turbidity — DFRobot SEN0189 (analog)

Looking to expand. Parameters I'm weighing:

- Dissolved oxygen

- Conductivity/salinity (EC)

- pH

- PAR / ambient light

- Depth/pressure

- Wave height / orientation via IMU

Specific questions:

1. Any low-cost sensors in these categories you've had good results with in wet/marine environments?

2. What's failed on you? Corrosion, drift, calibration issues?

3. Anything with a clean UART/I2C interface that plays nicely on a low-power duty cycle?

Not looking for Atlas Scientific-tier pricing, I’m trying to stay in the hobbyist/prosumer range.

Hi everyone! I’m working on an autonomous marine IoT buoy as a personal engineering project and looking for input from people who actually study the ocean.

Platform:

- Low-power MCU, solar + battery, LTE-M telemetry, SD logging

- Targeted at coastal/estuarine deployments

- Budget-constrained — accessible, low-cost sensors only

Currently instrumented:

- Water temperature (DS18B20)

- Turbidity (optical backscatter)

- LDR

From a research perspective what parameters are most underrepresented in existing low-cost monitoring networks? What would you actually find useful in a dataset from a fixed coastal/estuarine station?

I'm weighing up dissolved oxygen, conductivity/salinity, pH, PAR, depth/pressure, and wave motion via IMU — but I'd rather prioritise based on real research gaps than just instrument everything.