Visualizing water usage with groov:

As an Australian living in southern California I have been conflicted lots of times driving around seeing green lawns in baking hot sun.

When we moved to California from Australia in 2008, one of the worst droughts in history was still very much a huge issue for Victoria, the state we lived in. So when we arrived, the seemingly endless sea of green really, really surprised us all.

Australians have had little choice but to let their lawns brown off (often totally die) in the summer for many, many years...... It's just a fact of life of living in a sunburnt country.

As soon as we were able to buy our own home, I knew that monitoring our water usage was up near the top of my to-do list.

The challenge was how to share the data with the family, my wife and two teenage kids.

A typical day:

A typical day started arround 6 a.m. Getting up and getting into the mess to grab some breakfast and coffee, lots and lots of coffee.

Incidently, the food on the ship was fantastic. We had a young European cook who listened to one of my favorite DJs, Armin Van Buuran, while he was cooking... very cool.

Every morning at the factory and in the bridge on the ship, we had a team meeting at 7 a.m., usually around half an hour in duration. We each reported on the status of the system(s) we were managing. Mostly we were reporting if we were "go for launch," and if not, why not, was any other system holding our system up and how long would it take to get it ready.

After 7 years of planning and 3-4 months of frantic building, moving the submersible from the factory to the ship was a big deal.

We are engineers; we could have each spent another 6 months working on our parts of the system, but Jim was on a schedule and perfection would just have to take a back seat to safe and functional.

So there we were. In the wee hours of the morning, in a light rain, watching the crane very carefully lift our sub Deepsea Challenger onto the back of a flatbed truck.

Visual Data Overload

One of my many jobs during those first few weeks at the factory was to review the graphics used on the pilot's touchscreen interface.

Put simply, I was asked by Jim to "fix them."

To be fair, the lead programmer had a LOT on his plate at the time. Each of the 180 or so devices had to be tested and re-tested for its performance and its interaction with the rest of the control network on the submarine... Time to make the display "pretty" was just not something any of the team members had.

(Also keep in mind Jim is a movie director as well as deep sea explorer. The "look" of a control panel is an important aspect in his mind's eye).

Faster. Ever faster.

There are around 180 devices on the submarine that the Opto hardware needed to communicate with.

Since every signal could not have its own physical wire, all the devices used a serial protocol. Each device had an address and a set of registers that could take commands or report their status back to the control program.

The interior of the pilot sphere remained at atmospheric pressure (around 14 psi), so there was no decompression requirement for the pilot. The outside of the sphere however took the full brunt of the mass of all the water above it. At the Mariana Trench, that was around 16,000 psi.

Serial data, power, and video camera feeds went in and out of the sub via very (very) special connectors called penetrator ports, electrical and fiber optic cables that had been cast in glass.

Challenger Deep:

On the 25th of March, 2015, it will be the third anniversary of filmmaker and explorer James Cameron's record-breaking solo dive on the Mariana Trench, only the third man in history to visit the deepest point on Planet Earth.

Perhaps you have already seen the movie, "James Cameron's Deepsea Challenger 3D". (Go figure - I took time off work and saw the opening session at a local theater). If not, you can pick up a copy from Amazon or iTunes.

Quick tease, follow this blog for a chance to win the movie or a special t-shirt.

As in past years, around this time my mind frequently goes back to the role that I and the entire team at Opto 22 played in helping put Jim in the pilot's seat of this amazing submarine Deepsea Challenger.

Join me in this and the next few blogs, as I touch on some of the highlights that stick in my mind of this epic adventure.

G'day Mate!

Since I'm going to be joining the world of blogging here at Opto 22, I thought I would kick things off by introducing myself.

Born and raised in Australia, I moved to the USA to take up working for Opto, rather than with Opto, in 2008.

For some 18 years I used Opto 22 hardware and software to automate a large hospital complex. Pretty much every aspect of the hospital is either controlled or monitored by some part of Opto 22 gear.

HVAC, chillers, boilers, backup generators, ice banks, refrigeration, nursery, operating suites, the list goes on and on.

The cool thing? I could control all of it from my office.... in the basement.....