I'm Nathan Arts, I'm the project leader of A&B Sensors.
So about a year ago, it was the start of 2014, he came in and said, oh, there's an
X Prize competition.
We thought, let's go for it, let's give it a try, let's see what we can do, and let's
push ourselves to the limit.
Our biggest mistake was we thought that once we entered, we'd have about a year to develop
our sensor, but then we found out that we'd have to produce a prototype within the next
two weeks.
And then we realised we had to build a complete pH sensor, and thought it would be possible,
but I knew it was a massive challenge.
I've been working at Slumberjade for 10 years, I knew that the workshops at Slumberjade would
help us.
This is what we do, this is our little domain and our workshop.
So we both put extra hours in for it and produce the end product, which is invariably fine
and dandy, isn't it?
Yes, yes.
And no complaints yet.
We don't get many complaints.
I had good confidence in the team, bringing it together, yes.
Most definitely the XPRIZE has been the complete success for the team.
The learning curve has been steep, but it's been so worth it.
The competition has brought us together.
For that two weeks, they worked all weekends, day and night, until a Friday, they were too
tired to even put the actual sensor in the box, so I said, let's put some, hey guys,
we'll put some packing stuff around this to make sure it gets out there, but the energy
was just great, they were just so excited.
We're Team Envy, and we're ready for phase four.
How's the device working?
We're nervous.
We said goodbye to the sensor, but we don't know if it's going to come back.
Yeah, 2,000 meters is crazy, and well, we're hoping it comes back from 3,000 meters, but
yeah, nervous.
How deep do you want to go tomorrow?
We'll go all the way.
Here at the west coast of Norway, a lot of things evolve around the ocean.
It's part of our culture, like Leif Eriksson, who was from Norway originally, who was the
first European who traveled to North America.
Columbus was 400 years later.
We were already working on a pH sensor, so when the X-Price competition came along, that
was a perfect fit for us.
We had a quite good foundation because we could utilize our optical technology.
I think the most exciting thing about this X-Price is bringing together all the different
research environments and really sharpening everybody's focus towards attaining pH-Sense
technology with high stability and high precision.
It has been really great working in the X-Price competition.
Team Xilom is back from the abyss!
And the people are great.
I think the competitors really became good friends.
After years of testing and development and often many failures, you get some really
interesting results, and all of a sudden you can understand some processes that you didn't
understand before.
From I was a little boy, I loved the ocean.
I was fishing with my parents, swimming during the summer.
Winter dives are some of the greatest.
If the health of the world's oceans were to deteriorate significantly, this would be
a catastrophe for the world's population.
My dream for the ocean is that we are able to take care of it, stop acidification, and
do not pollute the ocean as we do today.
I went to sea as a commercial fisherman at age 13.
I learned that I loved being on the ocean.
Maybe I wasn't going to be the world's greatest salmon fisherman.
And so I became a scientist instead.
Team Durafed is a conglomeration of three institutions, Honeywell that developed the
Durafed chip, Scripps Institute of Oceanography, and those of us working at Imbari.
We had the advantage that we had been working on a pH sensor before the X-Prize competition
came along.
We at Imbari found this device.
It was super accurate and it worked so well.
We needed to develop a whole new system of thermodynamics to calibrate it, but it wasn't
managed to run in the ocean.
The X-Prize was perfect.
We had a clear objective.
We had a timeline.
It helped really pull everything together.
The most rewarding part is when you see something that you've done become successful.
I've been working on this for 40 years and it's really taken that long to really find
a device that really works.
We are Team HPHS.
We are ready, fast forward.
Go!
Jamstack is a time to study the ocean in Japan.
We mainly study the environment, nature, and ecosystem in Japan.
When we finally got the prototype, we got the information about the X-Prize.
In Japan, we first get funding from the government.
But the X-Prize is a very new concept.
If you don't do it together, you can't do it.
In Jamstack, we get information about the ocean and tell them about the technology.
We also make it a product for the company.
The X-Prize took a lot of trial and error in a very short period of time.
We had a lot of failures, but we had a lot of fun.
The most proud part of our HPHS sensor is the hybrid.
I call myself an inland oceanographer because we don't have an ocean here near Montana.
One of the challenges of doing a chemical oceanography 480 miles from the ocean is getting seawater.
Last time I was in Seattle, I ended up wading out into the Puget Sound with this jug.
Anytime anybody's heading to the coast, time to grab some seawater.
Here we are at Sunburst Sensors, the world headquarters here in Zula, Montana.
This is where the magic happens right here is our manufacturing space.
Mike and I and my wife, Catherine, all went to high school together.
Our approach requires a diversity of talents.
We have to do some electrical engineering, we have to do software.
There's fluidics because we've got a tiny little pump, a tiny little valve.
There's a mechanical design in terms of designing these pressure housings.
It's not an easy thing to make it work.
We're going to learn a lot from this because we could go out on our own and throw a Sammy down to 3,000 meters and collect data.
It's been an interesting process to be part of the XPRIZE competition because we were already leaders in autonomous pH measurement technology.
So we felt like we really had to shine in this competition.
We're a small company and we're competing against some teams who have a lot of resources and we've made a long way.
So that feels good that we've proven that with just a small team that we can do something this big.
