If you want to know whether or not the tides are high
enough to get your sloop out of Ockway Bay in Cape Cod, you could consult
NOAA’s tide tables. Trouble is, less’n you’re a pipe-smoking old-timer who’s handy with the lobster cages
and a sextant, they’re as likely to get you stuck going in and out
of the bay as they are to tell you, with sufficient accuracy, whether the
already-shallow draft below your boat is enough to let you safely navigate the
muddy shoals of your home port.
That’s where the internet comes in, and not the kind that’s stuck behind a desk, twiddling with an iPad – we’re talking about the Internet of Things. Using an ultrasonic level sensor to bounce sound waves off the sea surface in order to determine its height, an XBee radio to send that data to a receiver on shore, and most importantly, an ioBridge IO-204 to relay that information to servers in the cloud, Cape Cod resident and ioBridge hobbyist Robert Mawrey is able to broadcast to his entire community near real-time data on actual sea level.
The result, shown in solid blue, shows how far off NOAA’s tide estimates, represented with vertical blue hash marks, can be. (Check out real-time updates at the ioBridge tides site.) It’s enough to force a sailor belowdecks to whittle a whalebone for a half hour while he waits for the tide to cooperate, says Hans Scharler, president of software at ioBridge.
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