Teenagers Ben Hope, Harri Bell-Thomas and Benedict Allen from Monmouth teamed up at Young Rewired State’s Festival of Code at the end of July to create Buoy. Buoy is a small, autonomous boat shaped like a duck which records environmental conditions on our waterways including temperature, humidity and UV readings. A live Pi Camera feed from the boat gives a first-duck viewpoint. Here’s what the YRS site says about it:

Autonomous Raspberry Pi powered boat that records and posts data including temperature, humidity and UV readings, with live PiCam feed from the boat, to a web and mobile app client and represents these readings in charts, graphs and maps. This can be used in multiple environments for monitoring and gathering data for users.

Using open source data from UK Gov Environmental Data on pollution hotspots and Google Maps, it detects nearby pollution sites and goes to the sites autonomously, recording data at the pollution site. The user can also send commands to the boat to tell it to start and stop moving from the web client and mobile app for remote control over the boat’s movements. Clockwork SMS is used to report to users when the boat is moving to a destination and when it has stopped moving and also when it detects a potential environmental hazard, such as high pollution, in a certain area.

You can read more at YRS here and a nice summary at Free Press here.