Project West Wind

A successful week of testing.

We set up West Wind with 10% battery and the system pulling 1amp, this is equivalent of her sailing at around 2.8kph.

We left her in the garden for 4 days to see the state of the battery after this time.
West wind was able to run and charge its batteries under these circumstances and when we returned to her the batteries were at 100% and the solar charging system was taking care of the extra amperage.

This theoretically means, under the right conditions, she will run indefinitely !! The only consideration to this is that the Iridium modem takes a fair bit of power for every message (another reason to keep these to a minimum)

The next set of test will involve seeing how long the batteries will last under non ideal conditions. This may find the need to write a small program to lower power consumption by lowering motor power and turning off non essential systems if for example there is 100% cloud cover. A little bit like that scene 🎬 from Apollo 13……

The other two photos how a bit reinforcement of the hull with some fibreglass.

Apologies things have been quiet with this page. Sometime life just goes from 0-200mph and things get benched….

Anyways, picking up where I left off. Currently testing out the solar system and how it’s going to cope on a sunny day like today.

Launch was going to be next month but I think realistically I’m going to miss that because of how little time I’ve had on this. 😞

I’ve been waiting for this little device coming from the continent for a month or so now and now that it’s here I can start interfacing it with the rest of the system.

This little iridium modem gives the capability to send and receive data from anywhere on the planet so long as you have a clear view of the sky.

Ideal for a little boat on the North Sea !

The catch……you have to pay a monthly line rental to iridium and then you also get charged for every 50 bytes of data you send or receive. This will keep me motivated to keep data transfer to a minimum.

To help me and Elise out I’m thinking of setting up a “go fund me” page asking if anyone can donate to us in order to fund data transfer while Westwind is on her journey.

Once set up I’ll give details of the go fund me page on here so hang tight :)

First post in a while as I’ve been busy with other projects.

Over the Christmas period, and after weeks of research, I took the plunge and ordered the solar panels and a little solar charge controller for West Wind.

After the first day of research it was apparent that the panels needed to be larger than I first anticipated. This is synonymous with this technology as in reality we are fairly new to the technique of harvesting energy from the sun and because of that we aren’t the most efficient and doing so !

Solar panels at best have a have conversion efficiency of 40-50% but those are to most expensive, reserved for the likes of NASA and large companies. Consumer based units like mine have an efficiency of around 20% which means 80% is either reflected back to space or absorbed as heat.

All of the above means that you need panels much larger than what you think !!

There has been quite a bit of science/math behind my calculations. Watts per day , effective sun light hours, capacity of batteries etc etc. all of which has helped decide to launch the boat on or around the summer solstice of this year to give it the best chance of reaching its goal.

Pictures are of the panels sat on boat in the most intuitive configuration but I’m not set on this yet.

The other picture of the boat in the water is of a similar project (seacharger) which autonomously sailed the Atlantic with similar technology to West Wind. Again this shows the size of the panels required.

We made the press :)

Northumberland father and daughter aim to sail model boat across the North Sea A father and daughter have embarked on an ambitious project to sail a small unmanned boat from Amble to Norway.

Success, We have a working GPS auto pilot

I had a couple of hours free from work this afternoon and decided to the the boat down to the lakes to give it a go with the new and improved GPS antenna and updated navigation code. I set the way point as where I was standing in a hope that when i switched into GPS mode it would come back to me. I steered the boat out about 25m and flicked the switch. To my amazement the boat (which at that point was heading away from me) turned its bow around and started heading back towards me and arrived within about 3m of me. I tried this a couple of times to make sure it wasn't just fluke and it went back to the same spot every time. It was super smooth with no jerky oscillations in the steering or anything.

Getting back home and pulling up the data from the SD card. Immediately it was evident that the copper ground plane for the GPS antenna had worked as I was getting a GPS update every 1 second even when it was in the back of my van.

I'm also quite confident that all the data from the boat is now correct, namely, the speed, amps drawn which allows me to start sizing the solar panels for the top of the boat more accurately.

You can see from the second image that the data point tells us that when the boat was doing 2.2kph it was drawing 1.25amps.

This would mean for the 600km crossing the system would draw around 218 amps which means my system has a 176ah deficit given that my battery pack is 42ah !!! I need to somehow get the West Wind using less amps or the solar panels will need to be twice the size of the boat

Some more progress with West Wind this last couple of days.

I got to the bottom of the gps issue we were having where the position wasn’t updating if the boat was moving. This turned out to be a weak signal as I’d buried the gps antenna in amongst all the other electrical. After a bit online research I found that using a ground plane (the copper rectangle in the photo) will significantly improve the gps signal as it channels all the signal around the antenna to it. This also has the added bonus of improving HDOP or Horizontal Dilution of Precision. In short, it makes the fix more accurate in terms of where it thinks it is. There are a few photos of what the GPS device actually sees by using a cool bit of software called U-centre. The bar graph is the signal strength from each acquired satellite. The circular graph is the direction of each satellite and signal strength. As you can see this corresponds with the other photo from the web of real time locations of the gps sats. I was amazed that a tiny device the size of a thumb can pick up a radio signal in Amble from 22500m above China !

The second photo on this post you can see a small white plastic device with a motor attached. This is a little 12v water pump normally used for watering plants but with the use of a moisture detector and a couple of lines of code it has been repurposed into an automatic bilge pump. If West Wind takes on any water then the sensor will short which will tell the computer to switch a relay which in turn will power the pump for a specified duration of time. The pump still needs a couple of little rubber hoses. One to the lowest part of the hull and one to the outside of the boat.

Last night I managed to source a second hand Iridium 9602n SBD (short burst data) modem.

This little device is only 3 grams and about 50mm square and makes use of the Iridium array of satellites. With a small monthly charge and a service plan depending on how much data you need to send or receive it will let you commmunate with your laptop from anywhere on the planet.

It works in the same way as GPS but also sends data to a server which you can set as your own laptop. The data it sends has a limit of 340 bytes (340 1s or 0s or 340 characters eg ABCDE……..) per message so it’s perfect for this project.

It also brings up the possibility to send data to West Wind once it’s launched. This idea, although tempting as a way to maybe steer or change things on the boat does, I feel, negate from the spirit of what the project brief originally was.

“Build a boat which will sail autonomously across the North Sea”

If I were to send data to the boat in order to change its course for example then it’s no different to a long range remote control boat.

For that reason I’ve decided to only receive data from the boat to also us to view where it is and it’s on board stats.

🤞🏻finger crossed this doesn’t come back to haunt me 🙈

Elise and I have been contacted by Northumberland Gazette who wish to do an article in the new year on our project 😀
With this in mind I’ve set up a dedicated page for the project. This will steer people away from my personal page and also stop me spamming anyone who isn’t interested (though I will probably still share on my personal page 🙈)

We had our first go at letting West Wind navigate on her own today but things didn't go exactly to plan !!
We have a switch on the remote which switches the boat from manual to GPS. We set the destination cordinates to where we were standing and the boat should have came back to us........However is just span around in a tight circle at full rudder. This was a bit out of the blue because when bench testing everything worked as it should. Luckily, because I had inserted the SD card West wind was saving its data and I was able to upload the gathered coordinates to a useful online tracking map where you can set certain things like paths, colour etc etc. There was also an option called "cluster" whick tells you how many coordinates are in that area. Thus showed that for some reason the boat was only reading its gps coordinates at random times. As it is meant to be updating its location every 1 second this map should be littered with points but there are hundreds of metres of gaps where there is no points.
So she's back on the bench till next weekend. I've got a week of debugging ahead of me !!!!!

On Sunday we are going to give west wind her first attempt at navigating herself to a way point but first I thought id use these dark nights to set up some telemetry which will give us some idea as to what is happening on board when we set her away.
The first screen shot is the serial data which I have programmed west wind to spit out every 1 second (1htz) and save on an onboard memory card. This looks like digital nonsense but all the data is relevant and separated by a coma (,) this is important as Microsoft excel can split up data so long as its separated this way.
The second shot is what the memory card receives. This is saved as a TXT file.
The third shot is of Excel once this data has been split at every coma (,) and excel has neatly sorted it into rows and columns.
All of this is going to prove invaluable in the coming months as we try and figure out some things like the sweet spot of Kph and amps.
I'm also looking into the possibility of sending this data back to me once West Wind is set on her way over seas but this involves some fairly complex and expensive Iridium Satellite equipment to implement.
The forth shot is an example graph of time vs system voltage and was set up purely as an example.
EDIT. You will notice that the number for speed are fluctuating in the range of 0.69 and 3.89kph even though its currently sat on my dining table. This is a GPS phenomenon caused by using gps in doors. the signal gets scrambled around though wall and all sorts of other stuff and calculates as an incorrect speed.

Today we had the first sea trials of West Wind and it went amazingmy well.
She was really responsive and the tiny motor and propeller had enough torque to drive the boat forward. Ironically my laptop died with the cold so we were unable to test the GPS functionality so we only used it with manual control. However this did end up being useful as we could gauge how fast we wanted the boat to go using throttle trim on the hand held transmitter.
As I haven’t yet set up the other arduino to record telemetry of the boat, I downloaded a gps speedo on my iPhone and walked along side the boat at a comfortable speed. We clocked the boat to be going around 3km an hour at half throttle. It’s worth noting that the motor was fairly warm as we were running it at half throttle which means it wasn’t running efficiently (as last most I mentioned it would want to run at 90ish % for max efficiency) so 40% of its energy is being converted into heat. We need to get that number way lower for max efficiency. Hence looking at a lower pitched propeller. The current one is pushing way more water than it needs to to move the boat. This is evident by the wash at the stern of the boat.
Now that we have some initial data we can start crunching some numbers to figure out where we need to be with things:
Target destination - 600km
Current speed - 3kph
Time to destination 200hrs (8.333 days)
Next step is to get telemetry working so we can work out how many amps it’s drawing at its current speed and do a comparison of amps drawn vs speed. Obviously this will reply on a more efficient propellor for the application

We’ve nearly got a working prototype. Thanks to an old work colleague and his model club we were gifted a huge 1100mm fibreglass hull which ticks all the boxes for this project. There is a few little jobs to do before it takes to the water for its first sea trails including :
1. Tidy up the wiring
2. Fill the prop and rudder shafts with lithium grease
3. Glue all the connections in place
I’ve came up with a novel way of switching between autopilot and manual using a 3rd channel to simply switch the input to the servos from auto to manual using a couple of micro switches.
One thing that has me thinking is a thing called prop slip. A motor is most efficient at about 90% power or our case about 11v which equates to about 11000 rpm with my motor. The problem is all props on the market running at that speed will turn west wind in to an aqua planing monster. Prop slip is how efficient a prop is through its median. Be it water or air. Because west wind weights about 12kg the prop slip is massive as the prop is just moving water rather than pushing the boat. This will cause loads of inefficiencies and poor power consumption. This is adjusted by reducing the pitch of the blades but you can’t buy them like that so thinking about having one 3d printed out of metal or resin.
You can work out the theoretical speed a prop can produce by measuring the pitch of one revolution (like the pitch of a screw thread) and multiplying by RPM. You can reverse this by dividing the speed you want by rpm thus giving and ideal pitch.

We’ve finished the prototype nagivation system and over the moon with how it’s working.
We’ve predefined a target location of Salvoy Lighthouse in Norway though this may change.
This is the logic of this system.
1. Power on
2. GPS board ( red flashing thing) gets a fix on at least 3 of 36 GPS satellites currently orbiting earth
3. GPS board measures how long it takes a “ping” to reach it from each of those satellites and from that it can work out where it is on earth
4. Little Arduino uses Haversine formula to work out distance and course to target location
5. Compass ( the little thing I’m holding )tells Arduino its current heading in degrees and subtracts it from target course which equates to a heading error (degrees off course)
6. Arduino then tells rudder servo which way to turn to get boat back on course.
Each of these loops takes one second and it will do these 1 second loops for the the duration of its journey, so long as it has enough power. If it takes the boat 10 days to reach its destination then it would have done close to a million rudder calculations 😳
Note: excuse the incredibly rough rudder mock up 😂
A little problem I’ve got at the minute is under what logic I give power to the propeller ! It will need consistent power across its journey but not sure how to turn power off at the other end and what circumstance it uses to decide to power down. Open to suggestions on that one !

Some more if the Arduino code for West wind completed.
It turns out getting the micro-computer to find its location and bearing was the easy part - near as easy as just plug and play.
The real challenge was implementing maths for it to work out the way to it’s waypoint. Turns out the most accurate way to navigating the earth is using the Haversine formula ref. First picture.
This formula was calculated 200 years ago way before computers or calculators 😳 and at its simplest explanation means that the shortest way to any A to B on the globe always has the same radius from the centre of the earth (6371km to be precise). That’s why you fly over Greenland to get to New York !!Once you know this you can use some high school trigonometry to work out things like distance and course from A-B. Interestingly enough, your start bearing and end bearing differ massively as you “wrap” around the earth on your journey. For example, from UK - NY your start at about north-west and end at around south west !!
Implementing the math to the Arduino code has been nowt short of hell and you can see the formulas in picture 3 and 4 but I have managed to get the device to work out the distance, in Metres, from one set of coordinates to another. (See last pic and video)
Next step is for it to work out a course to waypoint (in-degrees) and have it control a servo to point the boat in that direction.

Over the last week I’ve been collecting some components to try and make this happen.
1. Arduino Uno - small, inexpensive micro controller for the brains of the operation - these are so good and are great for kids too. There is loads of documentation of them online and you can get full on starter packs with fun projects. Me and Elise had a bit fun writing a program to flash an LED as quickly as possible.
2. A GPS module. This will prove essential. (I’ll explain later)
3. Digital magnometer, basically a very sensitive component which detects and reads the earths magnetic field (digit compass but needs code to run)
I’ve also been thinking of the best way to get a little boat to navigate 600km on its own. There are loads of ways to but not all of them will be successful.
The most rudimental is to fix a rudder in a position and point the vessel where you want it to go. Ok on a lake but across an ocean, no chance.
Second, would be to use the digital compass to steer a rudder. In this case you would set a bearing (say 23degrees) and the rudder would always point the boat to 23dregree. The problem with this is that it still doesn’t account for wind, current, tides and ultimately will end in failure.
Thirdly, and the way in which I’ve chosen is a combination of compass and gps. Gps reads its current position, and computer calculates a heading to destination. Computer then reads current Compass data then decided which way to steer the boat.
So far I’ve managed to write a code which finds current gps and current bearing. The next part and probably one of the most complex is for the program to do a calculation to work out desired heading.
There is some documented theory on this which was formed a couple of centuries ago but I’ll explain that on the next update !!
There’s a video here showing the device’s currently LAT and LONG and the compass heading
🤙🏼

Project West Wind
Me and Elise have had a wild idea for a project. When I say me and Elise I mean me and Elise agreed with some level of enthusiasm.
The plan Is to make a small vessel based on the hull of an radio controlled boat and fit it with some complex but achievable electronics and have it sail automanously across the North Sea to a pre defined waypoint. (Probably some part of Norway) around 600km away !
The project will consist of a few different systems which include :
1. Propulsion - either sail or smaller geared motor and propeller (likely the later due to zero knowledge of sailing). However with motor and propeller comes the issue of keeping it charged, this is where some solar panels could come in handy !
2. Guidance - a rudder which will steer the boat from point A-B with decision making in between. Easy enough with a few small components and a bit programming.
3. Tracking - it’s no good just setting it away and hoping some one finds it in the other end. We want to be able to track it in real time on its journey and share its location with you all. Again. Some electronics and a bit know how will help here.
4. Recovery. Once landed in its destination (🤞🏻) we would like to visit the place it landed and recover it and bring it home
5. The Vessel - this needs to be robust enough to be able to withstand what ever the North Sea throws at it plus more !
This is another project I so wish my Grandfather could be here to help me with as it’s right up his street.
Wish us luck !