November 2020 - January 2021

The team has jumped right into the grit and grind of production!

Andrew, after making some website revisions and reassessing the project requirements, has transitioned completely into mechanical work. He has begun and finalized development for a “suspension-model” cage system. In this design, a rope is attached from a buoy at the water’s surface to a weight at the bed. Along the rope are bags full of oysters. Andrew designed a concrete weight from scratch, creating a silicone mold for the concrete to be poured into.

David has continued his masterful mechanical work. He first finalized his locking mechanism for his original cage iterations, designing notches and levers to lock and open the cage. He then transitioned into material research, working with natural resources, such as bamboo, to make a “fish basket” cage. These natural materials do not have the greatest durability, so this proved to be quite difficult. From the natural materials, David moved to a “beehive” cage design with stacked box pieces with shelves for oysters to sit on. This idea was ultimately scrapped, and in its place, the modular design was born. The modular design involves screws and threading to connect different components of a cage. David is currently working on perfecting this modular design.

Ethan is hard at work researching sensors. The sensor development has proved to be quite a challenge, but Ethan is rising up to it. He has been continuing his deep research to create the best possible sensors, and he has still been working to perfect his abilities with KiCAD. He also began work with a CO2 sensor. He soon will be able to test sensors in the Ala Wai.

In January, the MOMI team also submitted their project virtually to the HAIS District Science Fair under the Environmental Engineering category. Check out our Student Corner page to learn more about our project!

In the new year, the MOMI team will be finalizing cage development, programming sensors, and integrating data into the website.

February 2021 - March 2021

The MOMI team had a busy couple of months!

Andrew transitioned once again, this time to electronics. With very little experience in electrical engineering prior to the project, it was definitely a steep learning curve, and it took many hours of research to progress with his work. However, he was able to succeed in choosing, programming, and calibrating temperature, turbidity, and conductivity sensors. These sensors, which connect via Wi-Fi to the ThingSpeak cloud, were tested in a fish tank and worked ideally! Andrew will be deploying the sensors very soon, which will mean that the data will be seen on this website. Andrew also designed a base and connection system for textured concrete spat collectors, which will help to facilitate the growth of oysters!

David has continued to improve his designs. He has made some minor fixes, including creating a lid, a connector with project name and school logo, and changing the size to accommodate a different amount of oysters. He recently produced seven 12mm cages, four 6mm cages, twenty 5mm cages, and 10 wire mesh cages for the O’ahu Waterkeeper. He has also begun bending and cutting rods to hold the cages together.

Ethan had a very busy couple of months. He started working with an ESP32 before working with Atlas sensors to connect the ESP32 to the sensors via I2C protocol. This connection was successful, as the sensors could read data and display it to a serial monitor. Ethan then worked on connecting the ESP32 to the Ubidots cloud, and this was also successful. Soon after, he combined the two programs so that the sensors could read and the data could be sent to the Ubidots cloud. This code compilation was successful too! Both the conductivity and the temperature sensors could be read by the Ubidots cloud as two individual variables coming from a single device. Ethan then began work on using the LoRa Feather, a long range Wi-Fi rig, because the environment we are working with won’t have Wi-Fi. This radio wave connection will to get the data to a device that actually is connected to Wifi, away from the riverbank. He is still facing some problems, but he will have the LoRa working soon!

After being recognized in the HAIS District Science Fair under the Environmental Engineering category, the MOMI Project advanced to the 64th Hawaiʻi State Science & Engineering Fair. Check out our Student Corner page to see more!