This project emerged five years ago while trying to reverse engineer a forward looking sonar unit fitted to my work boat. The circuit board was dead simple and looked like a home etch job even though it was manufactured by a major military contractor in the 1970's.

There were only a handful of active components and evidently analog sonar is powered by 48vdc and black magic.

A new sonar head and interpreter could have been fitted but that wasn't in the budget. Why couldn't there be a micro controller library and driver design for a variety of transducers that would output a simple data stream?

My frustration was based on something I wanted to do, it was not essential to my welfare or survival. After taking a job writing about maritime topics I saw many dire problems firsthand and received many more messages from seafarers.

Plenty of these problems could have been fixed with technology that was out of reach of many of these people. The entire Somali piracy problem was based on fishing disputes that could have been solved with monitoring and enforcement before things got out of control.

Fishermen in the developing world often operate without radios, navigation, or safety beacons. This leads to dangerous isolation and possibly fishing outside of allowed boundaries.

All of the problems with water based vehicles and support systems can be solved with good design and generosity of the open source hardware and software communities. So today we start to change that situation.