Ocean Pulse / openCTD — Real-Time Oceanographic Sensor Platform
January 2024 | Client: R&D / Confidential
Ocean Pulse / openCTD is a full-stack IoT monitoring platform for modular marine and water-quality instruments. It connects ESP32-based probes and an OceanPulse multisensor unit to configurable MQTT brokers, normalizes incoming telemetry and streams live readings to a Laravel dashboard through Server-Sent Events. The monitored parameters include conductivity, temperature, pressure/depth, pH, dissolved oxygen, salinity and optical measurements from the PIXIE fluorometer and AS7341 spectral sensor.
I designed and implemented the software workflow end to end: the Laravel backend, Livewire and Alpine.js interface, Backpack administration, MQTT connection management and the bridge that keeps sensor messages available to the browser in real time. The platform also reflects the physical constraints of the instrument: a Raspberry Pi gateway writes measurements locally, publishes them over Mosquitto and supports remote commands for starting and stopping acquisition, clearing logs, rebooting and calibrating sensor boards.
For operations, the dashboard exposes multiple broker profiles, message identifiers, explicit responses and expanded error information instead of treating every MQTT message as an anonymous value. Calibration commands are validated before being sent to the device command topic, while the live charts make it possible to read the probe output during laboratory or field tests. This separation between acquisition, transport and presentation keeps the platform extensible as new sensors are added.
Official publication: the project was published by the European Commission Joint Research Centre as OCEAN-PULSE: Open-source Conductivity, Temperature, and Depth (CTD) system integrated with a Pulse-Amplitude Modulated (PAM) fluorometer. Andrea De Camilli is listed among the co-authors.
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