[David M]

Electronics that float. If its electrical and it goes on a boat then have probably had to mess with it at some time. I have skippered a research vessel for 16 years now and have installed and maintained oceanographic sampling equipment and marine electronics which at times can be pretty high maintenance. I have four computers on board used for seeing the data in real time, data logging and navigation. The computers run the software which runs a number of instruments and sampling devices such as a bottom tracking current profiler Doppler, a flow through system which measures various qualities of the water, a carousel which is used to take water samples at different depths and a conducting cable winch which sends data up a special cable which has insulated wires internally. Most of the marine electronics are integrated using NMEA0183 which is a type of ASCII basically. Some of the newer electronics are using ethernet to communicate. All the info generated by the marine electronics, weather station and oceanographic equipment can be logged. Plus the boat has internet access underway, built for the local ferry system, which can feed back collected data to shore so that scientists can see this data in near real time from their office. I also teach undergraduate and grad students for the university that I work for.