On 8 July 2026, Revive Our Gulf hosted a Tech Talk with Steve Harris from Advanced Aquarium Technologies, who has designed and freely shared the Dropcam Telemetry Viewer. It is an easy-to-use, low-cost tool for underwater monitoring and marine survey work.
It’s one of those great Kiwi ingenuity stories. Steve has used an affordable underwater camera, a mobile phone to record GPS, created a “viewer”, and brought it all together in a practical tool that people can actually use.
The software Steve has developed synchronises timestamped video footage with the GPS track from a mobile phone. This allows users to review footage, map where observations were made, mark sightings, define transects or areas of interest, and generate reports that can be shared with others.
What stood out most was how accessible the whole system is. The dropcam itself uses a 3D-printed housing, sinkers, and a simple reel of fishing line. It has been designed to be operated from almost any vessel: a small boat, kayak, or paddleboard. Moving slowly, at around 0.5 km/h, allows the camera to hang beneath the vessel and collect useful footage that can later be linked reasonably accurately to GPS.
The tool is especially useful for presence detection and follow-up surveys. It does not try to replace full ecological assessment, but it does make it much easier for community groups, iwi, hapū, researchers, and conservation organisations to record what they see, where they saw it, and then analyse that footage more easily.
The mobile phone app and software are impressive. The user interface for both is clear, practical, and easy to use. It includes tools for adding sightings and notes, capturing images from video, using overlays, comparing survey tracks, and producing outputs such as PDF reports, spreadsheets, CSV files, images, GPS tracks, ZIP files, and share links. The map overlays are particularly useful for marine biosecurity work, including layers for controlled areas, rāhui and closures, marine protection areas, and Caulerpa-related information.
Importantly, the tool does not hold or host the data. Data needs to be saved locally by the user, which helps navigate sensitivities around data sovereignty and data sharing.
Big mihi to Steve for this significant contribution. He has brought together his IT and engineering skills, marine interests, and practical field knowledge to create something that is free, open source, and genuinely useful. It has been designed to be accessible, affordable, and usable by people who care about the marine environment and want to contribute good-quality observations.
For those of us working in marine restoration, biosecurity, and community-led monitoring, tools like this help lower the barrier to participation, speed up analysis, and make it easier for careful observations to become useful information.
s
More information about Steve’s Dropcam Telemetry Viewer is here: https://dropcam.aat.nz/
Watch a recording of the Tech Talk with Steve doing a live demo of how to use it using this link.