MLabs builds open, solar-powered sensor nodes for fish passage, water quality, and harmful-algal-bloom detection — engineered to deploy at the density the basin needs, at one-tenth the cost of incumbent systems.
The Great Lakes hold one-fifth of the planet's surface freshwater. Yet continuous in-situ monitoring reaches less than two percent of the sites that fisheries and public-health decisions depend on.
The constraint is not science — it is unit cost. A commercial fish-passage array runs $10,000 a site; a continuous water-quality station, $15,000; a phycocyanin fluorometer for algal blooms, upward of $7,500. At those prices, an agency instruments a handful of sites and interpolates the rest.
A single IP68 enclosure and shared firmware tree, configured by sensor population — not by separate hardware programs. That commonality is what holds the cost down.
Solar in-stream PIT-tag reader at 134.2 kHz FDX-B. Supplemental-density fish-passage monitoring at undermonitored barriers and culverts.
SpecificationsFull sensing configuration: optical fluorescence, lab-grade pH and conductivity, and air quality, with on-node cyanobacteria inference.
RoadmapRepurposes the gateway mesh for sub-gram LoRa wildlife beacons. Hardware-ready; beacon firmware on the late-2026 roadmap.
Design notesEach node samples on a duty cycle, buffers to local storage, and uplinks compressed telemetry over 915 MHz LoRaWAN to a gateway. From there the data flows through an entirely open stack — no proprietary platform anywhere in the chain.
Verified the morning of 27 May 2026. Status changes week to week; nothing here is a promise.
| Program | Ceiling | Window | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NSF SBIR Phase I · Project Pitch | $305k | rolling, pending restart | Paused |
| NOAA Great Lakes Fish Habitat | $12M | deadline 4 Sep 2026 | Open |
| USDA NRCS Conservation Innovation | $250k | FY26, to be announced | Monitor |
| NIH NIEHS SBIR R43 | $306k | 5 Sep · 5 Jan | PA reissue |
| EPA SBIR Phase I | $100k | spring–summer 2026 | Expected |
| EPA Environmental Justice Grants | — | terminated by statute | Closed |
MLabs is at bench-prototype stage. No node is in the field yet; the dashboard is a labelled mockup; the institutions named across this site are outreach targets, not signed partners; and the code repositories are in preparation. This site documents engineering and intent — not deployed operations.