This project develops an Internet-of-Things (IoT) device, called Underwater Eye, to operate an underwater camera and observe aquatic animals at an extremely close range.

Underwater Eye is built with a Raspberry Pi, TT motor (DC motor with a gearbox), motor driver (DRV8833), camera (Raspi official camera module V3) and waterproof camera case (Entaniya's IP67-rated WC-01). It runs Python code that drops down a camera from the surface to a tank/aquarium, takes pictures and videos in the tank/aquarium, pulls up the camera, and uploads the pictures and videos to a cloud database called Kintone. The pictures and videos can be shared/distributed with the Kintone smartphone/tablet app and Web browsers. Underwater Eye provides the user Terminal-based character commands and Siri-based voice commands to control the camera.

This project was submitted to and presented at AnimalHack 2024. It won a 3rd place award.

Hanna Suzuki, "Underwater Eye: An IoT Camera to Observe Underwater Creatures," In B. Ouchi and Y. Karube (eds.), Advancing Sustainable Human-Animal Relationships: Tales from AnimalHack 2024, Chapter 7, pp. 69 - 84, Binnovative Innovation Book Series, Binnovative, ISBN: 979-8-3031-7918-9, June 2025. preprint