Development of MSP430-based ultra-low power expandable underwater acoustic recorder

Reducing overall power consumption is core issue in low power, high sampling rate, large storage data loggers necessary for long-term underwater acoustics research and other applications. A low-power microprocessor MSP430 offers a solution for the development of long-term deployment remote systems. In this paper, we present a multi-MSP430, master-slave architecture to resolve the power limitation issue. The proposed design is scalable in nature. For every additional slave unit installed in the array, the data sampling and streaming rate can be increased proportionally. We demonstrate the advantages of this concept using a multi-channel underwater acoustic recorder with a 100 kHz sampling rate. The performance of the system is demonstrated by a field acoustic experiment in which the reflection coefficient of the seafloor is measured. The proposed architecture will be applicable to many underwater long-term deployment systems. With its flexibility in configuration and synchronization of multi-channel sampling, it also provides a simple architecture for the construction of hydrophone arrays.