Water quality testing in the field is still mostly grab samples and clipboards. Operators pull a bottle, drive it to a lab, and find out three days later whether something was wrong on Monday. By then, the algae bloom is in full swing, the contamination has already moved downstream, or the treatment system has burned through twice the chemistry it should have.
We built the WQM-1 because we got tired of explaining why this is a solved problem.
What WQM-1 actually is
It's a Raspberry Pi HAT — an open-platform sensor stack that reads pH, TDS, turbidity, ORP, temperature, and GPS continuously, then ships the data to the BlueSignal Cloud. Operators see live readings on their phone. Anomalies trigger alerts. Trends get logged forever.
We install it for you — book a $99 site survey and we'll quote the build for your site — or run a pilot through one of our installer partners.
Why open hardware
Every sensor we ship is documented end-to-end:
- Schematics and firmware are published to GitHub.
- Sensor calibration is reproducible — no proprietary black boxes.
- Data ownership stays with the operator. The Cloud is opt-in; you can self-host the same stack.
Closed monitoring systems make sense for vendors. They don't make sense for operators who need to trust the data well enough to defend it in front of a regulator, an insurance carrier, or a customer.
Who this is for
Three groups, in order of how often we hear from them:
- Aquaculture and pond operators — tilapia, shrimp, koi, bass. Continuous DO and temperature is the difference between a healthy harvest and a midnight emergency.
- Treatment plant pilots — small-system operators piloting nutrient-recovery, struvite, or membrane processes who need granular feed-stream data.
- Contractor partners in adjacent trades — solar, electrical, battery, and atmospheric water installers whose customers also need water-quality monitoring on the same site.
If any of those describe your work, book a $99 site survey or get in touch via the contact form on the home page.
What's next
We're rolling out the first 12 BlueSignal sites in batches — 2 are already deployed (one with us, one with our channel partner Aquaria), and 10 beta slots are open for outside operators. One slot per company, paired 1:1 with a BlueSignal engineer for the first 90 days. Use code BETA at checkout for 20% off your $99 site survey.
This blog is where we'll publish field notes, calibration deep-dives, contractor case studies, and the occasional postmortem. Subscribe by checking back, or watch the GitHub releases for firmware updates.
— The BlueSignal Team