"Maka" - Eye, "Niu" - Coconut
Maka Niu, aka the "CocoCam," is a low-cost oceanographic camera and sensor platform that enables the exploration of undersea environments using a new pressure-tolerant camera housing, built in conjunction with Allan Adams and MIT's Future Ocean Lab, and an all-natural, locally sourced, biodegradable buoyancy-control device. The coconut (Cocos nucifera ) can float for over 3,000 miles and still remain viable; as such, it makes an excellent organic platform for deploying scientific apparatus.
Maka Niu is a community-driven project that allows local groups to explore and monitor their marine resources. Based around off-the-shelf single-board computers and readily available microprocessors, Maka Niu is inexpensive to produce, easy to program, and simple to use. Designed as an open platform for scientific education and exploration, it will give classrooms and communities the ability to upload video and sensor data into FathomNet, a centralized database where machine learning algorithms assist with classification of marine species, seabed substrate identification, and accumulated time-series sensor data. This data will be publically available, allowing visualization, sharing, and discussion with policy makers from the local to global levels.