A New Mooring Controller platform: an evolution of the OASIS instrument controller toward a distributed ocean observing system

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) is a privately funded, non-profit research institute dedicated to technology development in support of the oceanographic community. The New Mooring Controller (NMC) project was begun at MBARI in the fall of 2000 to develop the next evolutionary step to the current OASIS mooring controller. The NMC design features a low-power 32-bit embedded processor and incorporates advanced embedded software technologies. This paper focuses on the system requirements and design decisions that were made regarding system hardware and software.