New mooring controller
Lead Scientist: Jim McFarlane and Francisco Chavez
Lead Engineer/Project Manager: Bob Herlein

The New Mooring Controller proposal is a continuation of the 1999 project of the same name. The 1999 project was approved to start in July of 1999 as a two year project. The goal is to replace the existing OASIS mooring controller.

The OASIS mooring controller has been in service since January 1992. It has been successful in supporting data collection to study the biogechemistry of Monterey Bay (M1, M2, M3), mullti-institutional shipboard experiments (IronEx 1 & 2, COOP cruises, ShiftUp cruises), and deployed on the TOGA/TAO array for opto-biological and chemical measurements (EqPac 1 & 2).

However, the OASIS hardware and software is quickly becoming obsolete and unsupportable. We have only 8 controller boards remaining. The boards are old and showing wear in their mechanical and electrical interfaces. There are numerous circuit modifications which are fragile and subject to failure in harsh environments. The software is equally old, built from software tools that haven’t been updated in years.

This project has primary and secondary goals. The primary goal is to replace the existing functionality supported by the OASIS controller, using modern hardware and software tools and techniques. It will use the StrongArm processor developed by Radochonski which will presumeably become the core processor for new instrumentation at MBARI and for MOOS. The software will use the VxWorks operating system, as used on Tiburon and for the Nav processors on the Western Flyer and Pt Lobos, and will use object oriented techniques similar to the application frameworks used by O’Reilly on Tiburon and Cline on Genosensor. In summary, the primary goal is to replace existing functionality with modern components and tools.

The secondary goal is to coordinate with the Instrumetation Software Infrastructure project and with MOOS, to serve as an incremental development toward the larger software architecture being proposed for MBARI. In this context, we would like to experiment with forward-looking software design techniques, such as CORBA and distributed-object network architectures, in order to be a first step towards the architecture being developed for MOOS. Note that this is a secondary goal, subject to delivery of primary goals and limitations of resources.