Hurricane Sandy Tide Levels

October 29, 2012 By

Just in case you haven’t heard, there is a giant storm heading towards the East Coast of the United States caused by Hurricane Sandy. If you need more evidence that something is going to happen, you can check out our tide level data that we collect from around Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Storms of this size affect all kinds of weather system data such as pressure, temperature, and tide levels. A recipe for anticipating a major event is when you see the pressure drop and see a change in the amplitude of the tide levels. As you can see below, the tide levels are shifted upwards by 15″ to 20″. Please, stay safe! We will do the same thing as we button-down the hatches at ioBridge HQ.

Hurricane Sandy Tide Levels in Cape Cod

At one of the marinas, we have a security camera setup running off of an APC battery backup system. Here’s what really high tides look like.

Hurricane Sandy Tide Levels Security Cam

Here’s another photo of a dock submerged under water:

Hurricane Sandy Tides Dock Under Water

The system is running an ioBridge Gateway with connected battery-powered sensors over an XBee radio network. The tide level sensors are MaxBotix ultrasonic level sensors. Check out the Technology Review article, Cape Cod is Tweeting, Thanks to the Internet of Things, for more information about our tide project or contact us.

[via TideAlerts.com]

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Tide Sensors, Hurricane Irene, and the Internet of Things

August 29, 2011 By

As we announced last year, we have been running tide level points around Cape Cod to more accurately alert boaters about high and low tides. Our tide sites are connected to the Internet via the ioBridge platform. We also provide real-time alerts and tweets to boaters in Cape Cod and surrounding marinas.

One of our many TideAlerts.com subscribers had the idea to “watch” the tide levels during Hurricane Irene. After analyzing the data, we observed something interesting. The period of the tides did not change, but the amplitudes (the high tide and low tide marks) were greatly exaggerated as Hurricane Irene passed through Cape Cod.

The ioBridge tide project is another example of how the Internet of Things is emerging. We started this project 3 years ago and it provides an extremely useful service and is only possible by aggregating tons of sensor data and sharing it with users, developers, and researchers. This application is based on open data from NOAA and users monitoring environmental information and tries to find more meaning than just being a collection site of data.

By the way, here is what the tides looked like during Hurricane Irene at one of our public monitoring sites:

Tide Sensor Charts During Hurricane Irene

The good news is that by the time Hurricane Irene made it to Massachusetts, the storm was weak and all of our tide sensor sites survived.

Check out the Technology Review article, Cape Cod is Tweeting, Thanks to the Internet of Things, for more information about our tide project or contact us at support@iobridge.com.

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The Future of M2M is Real-time and Low-cost

July 12, 2011 By

The fastest growing segment of mobile carriers is their M2M customers. M2M is machine-to-machine. Instead of you and I buying a mobile data subscription for our apps, M2M is a “machine” connected to the Web via a mobile modem or DSL lines or cable modems. ABI Research says that Cellular/Mobile M2M subscriptions will reach over 297 million by 2015. This means there will be a bunch of things on the mobile phone network that are not people. This is not new information, this what we call the Internet of Things or in a more practical sense, the Intranet of Things.

Our background was M2M. The founding team of ioBridge worked on far-reaching M2M applications such as remote monitoring of medical devices, SCADA applications for pump and well monitoring, Oil and Gas pipeline monitoring, and substation power monitoring for Smart Grid applications. When we founded ioBridge we wanted to take our experience with M2M and couple that with our big ideas that everything should be Internet-enabled. To reinvent M2M, we had to create a new platform. Once a machine is connected, truly connected, that machine can leverage web services and social networking to ultimately enable first-of-their-kind applications.

ioBridge consists of many parts in concert with web services:

  • Real-time push messaging from device to web services, web services to devices
  • Multiple ways to interface with devices
  • Low-power wireless sensors (we still have tide sensors connected to the web for over 2 years)
  • Widget and application builders
  • Multiple ways to interface with external web applications
  • Native support to interface with WeatherBug, Google Weather, NOAA, Google Calculator, Yahoo Financials, Twitter, ThingSpeak, FourSquare, FaceBook, and any open API via our ThingHTTP app.

As a result, the ioBridge platform enables real applications that solve many of the traditional issues with a polling style M2M or SCADA solutions. We take full advantage of connecting things to web services. The additional benefit is low-cost. Maybe the biggest disruption that we have seen is cost. Since you can buy our dev kit for less than $200 and get a free suite of web services, you can start building an app immediately. Cost also lowers the barrier to entry for a whole host of new M2M customers that previously were cost prohibited from taking advantage of M2M applications.

In a recent article from the Yankee Group, Parlez-vous M2M?, Emily Green includes ideas about where M2M is going and some input from Dr. Robert Mawrey, the CEO of ioBridge. She also mentions how we “internet-enabled” a cranberry bog. Emily will be releasing a follow-up interview with Dan Luechauer, a cranberry bog owner, who has a completely  automated, remotely controlled and monitored cranberry bog via ioBridge technology. (Emily – Thanks for including us in your post and we look forward to your future articles.)

We have 100’s of examples just like Dan’s cranbrery bog. We look forward to sharing more applications with you. Visit the ioBridge Pro Applications section of our website for the latest info and ways to get started with ioBridge.

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ioBridge Tide Alerts on MIT’s Technology Review Blog

June 15, 2010 By

MIT’s Technology Review blog features an article about our tide level application. Along with a few ioBridge customers, we setup tide monitoring sites in Cape Cod that measure tide levels and environmental data in real-time. The data collected is used to alert people in the area of rising or falling tide levels, so you know when to bring your boat back to the dock. The sites are part of our growing sensor and control network all over the world built on top of the ioBridge platform.

Green Pond Tide Monitoring Site

Green Pond Tide Monitoring Site

Christopher Mims, journalist at the MIT Technology Review, writes, “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 technology behind the tide monitoring sites is based around the ioBridge platform. We will be releasing our Pro hardware and web services soon available for commercial products and services. The tide alerts site is just one example of the new things we have in store.

We collect the data on our demo site for everyone to take a look at and sign up for email/SMS alerts. We will be opening up the feeds for others to build applications. Visit tidealerts.com to check it out.

Tide Level Charts

Tide Level Charts

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