To foster a new generation of ocean-monitoring floats and other devices, Sofar Ocean Technologies and DARPA are publishing an open hardware standard called Bristlemouth so that researchers will have an off-the-shelf option rather than wasting their precious grant dollars solving the same engineering problems from scratch.

Sofar Ocean is partnering with DARPA, the Office of Naval Research, and Oceankind to develop an open hardware and software standard as part of the Sofar Ocean's commitment to advancing the ocean sensing industry. "The lack of a hardware connectivity standard is a huge hindrance to development and innovation. Today, a large portion of budgets allocated to development of new ocean technologies are spent toward resolving fundamental technical bottlenecks — power, data and communications connectivity — rather than on actual ocean innovation,” - Evan Shapiro, CTO of Sofar Ocean.