SEAWATER Cubes

SEAWATER Cubes GmbH is a young company that was established as a start-up from the Saarland University of Applied Sciences. It has set itself the task of making the farming of marine fish possible in smaller units too for farmers or other interested individuals. To this end, the ‘aquaculture of the future’ was developed – a compact, standardised plant that enables domestic production of high-quality marine fish. The modular cube, developed as a circulation system, consists of three overseas containers containing the water basins and the complete, fully automated technology. The system takes over all the control and monitoring tasks, relieving the strain on the operator enormously. About 7 t of fish can be produced each year on an area spanning 100 square metres. A demo plant with current stock of 14,000 sea bass is available to visit in Saarbrücken. The address and more information can be found at https://seawatercubes.de.

Meta-Level’s task: Meta-Level was assigned the task of creating a monitoring platform that could be used to remotely visualise and monitor relevant fish farm parameters, such as temperatures, salinity, PH value, etc. It should be possible to connect the platform to any number of plants set up around the world and control them from the company’s head office. The data is transferred from the system’s PLC over an OPC UA interface and transferred to the platform software, where it is written to a database. So it is then available for further evaluations – both of historical processes and for real-time online viewing.

Individual tasks:

  • Developing an easy-to-use interface
  • Connecting the platform to the system’s PLC over an OPC UA interface
  • Developing secure data transfer between the plant and the platform
  • Developing various evaluations and online presentations
  • Ensuring multi-tenant capability, so that many plants can be managed simultaneously using the platform
  • Ensuring expandability to include functionalities for optimised customer care through direct support and purchasing options for feed and auxiliary materials
  • Including the option of influencing the plant’s parameter settings (at the planning stage)

Expertise and technologies:

  • Raspberry PI
  • OPC UA
  • REST API
  • PHP
  • Angular
  • PostgreSQL