Typically, measuring ocean wave conditions can require some fairly expensive equipment, or relies on distant wave buoys or computer models that may not give the best picture of your local field site. We designed the Open Wave Height Logger to provide researchers with a low-cost and long-duration pressure sensor data logger that could be used to reconstruct wave heights and sea state. The results of this project are available in our open access paper published in Limnology and Oceanography: Methods.

The electronic circuit board designs are made freely available, as well as the software to run the device, which is derived from the Arduino open source hardware project. The sensor and batteries get housed in a homemade PVC plumbing pipe housing. More information can be found on the project’s Github repository and at http://owhl.org which contains a wealth of information on all of the assembly, programming, and deployment methods we’ve come up with during the course of this project.

The Journal of Experimental Biology highlighted our paper on the interaction between limpet temperature stress and susceptibility to oystercatcher predation. The news article is available here: https://jeb.biologists.org/content/223/7/jeb224923

The paper that this work is based on is available here: https://jeb.biologists.org/content/223/7/jeb213595. This work was done in collaboration with Rachel Pound and Professor Jennifer Burnaford at CSU Fullerton as part of Rachel’s M.Sc. project. Felicia King helped with the design of the limpet force transducer that we used to estimate the force exerted by the pecking oystercatcher.