A group of engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has created a wireless underwater chamber that is fed by noise in the surrounding water, which can be powered by both the noise of passing ships and the active activity of marine residents, and can help to study the ocean, 95 percent of which remains more mysterious than the moon's side of Earth's science.
The energy to power the chamber is derived from the piezoelectric cells that are placed all over the surface of the shell. Piezoelectric cells generate energy when they are under pressure. In this case, sound waves from any powerful water sources respond. When the cells accumulate enough reserves, the camera begins to shoot underwater. This is also a special process, because the device must be fully energy-efficient in all modes, and its energy efficiency exceeds the analogy by about 100,000 times.
For underwater filming, engineers adapted a low-cost image sensor without colour filters. The question of obtaining a color image was decided almost as at the dawn of the photos, taking images of the object separately for each of the three color channels RGB. For each of the colors, a flash of green, red and blue LEDs was created. The resulting colour image was obtained after the merger of all three colour channels into one.
The wireless transmission issue is also solved in an original, but long-known way, by redistributing the sound in the water. In order to count the camera data underwater, researchers irradiated it with a sound wave. The camera rebuffed the sound wave or absorbed it, thus encoding the sequence of 0 and 1. This job required much less energy than direct transmission.
The solution proposed can work both in the light and in the dark. The image's readability leaves much to be desired, but for a number of tasks to monitor the marine environment, the camera is sufficient. In the future, the developers will try to improve the camera's image quality and hope to receive a video broadcast. The prototype has proved to be effective and can move on, with a marked improvement in the solution.