It's been a busy week at Tini

First we took the Apple Watch Ultra to the UW pressure vessel and took it down to 100m. It didn't implode!

 

Putting the cap on the UW Pressure Vessel before we filled it with water and simulated 100m ocean depth.

 

Apple Watch Ultra in the cage and ready to be submerged.

Then I took the bus to Tacoma to join the September WOAC Puget Sound cruise with NANOOS on the R/V Rachel Carson.

 

Early morning light while still at the dock in Tacoma.

Then we did our first deployment of the Apple Watch Ultra by attaching it to the ship's CTD and taking it for a profile to 40 meters.

 

Can you find the watch? It's Tini.

And the data looks GREAT! It’s decimated (software) and there is some thermal lag (hardware), but nothing unexpected. We have to rewrite some software to do the actual analysis but there is a lot to work with here.

 

Temperature profile from the first cast on the R/V Rachel Carson's CTD down to 40 meters.

To get the data, we have been using a dive app called Oceanic+ while we build our own app that is specifically suited for science. While there are a bunch of things that need to be improved, the dive app is has been a crucial feedback tool as we start testing.

 

Oceanic+ App giving us some pretty data.

The dive app also didn't like it when we took the watch to 100m, but it didn't break so it's a win!

 

Warning that depths are not good for humans.

What we did realize is that anyone can actually start taking temperature and pressure data right now with the Apple Watch Ultra. We will post more detailed instructions later, but loosely here are the steps you need to start making your own underwater temperature and pressure measurements:

1. Use the Oceanic+ App to take data underwater. You can either use the free Snorkel mode or pay for the Scuba mode if you want to immediately visualize the data on your watch.

2. Convert the data into an XML file using the following AWU2UDDF.

3. Import the XML file into Python, R or Matlab and plot away!

If you do try it, let us know because we are really curious to see what your experience is and it will help us design a better app specifically for science.

 

Seriously ready to science.