Good day,
Dear support team,
I’m a seaman and communication is most important part of my marine life. Frequently we use wi-fi connection from our vessel to shore-based stations provided free wi-fi signal.
Sometimes that stations located quite fare from our vessel, or our vessel staying at anchor at sea fare away from shore and in this circumstances we have to get wi-fi.
For this purpose I use strong antenna “direction” type. It can get signal on rather long distances, but it should be always pointed strictly on station otherwise wi-fi signal will be lost. But, as You know, vessel rolling on sea waves and turning on sea currents that force me to change antenna direction all the times!
I made antenna bracket with servo to operate antenna direction by remote control.
(see video, attached link- youtube.com/watch?v=PFSG_X6KHn8&feature=autoshare ).
Now Id ’like to make it abele to keep set direction automatically as horizontally 180° as vertically 45°. As I understand I have to use gyro sensor for that.
So, Id ‘like to ask Your good advise which sensors and parts I have to order? And how to connect it with my servos to get my project able?
Hope You understood my idea)
With best regards,
Mr. Oleksii Buteiko.
Sounds like a great and unique project! I’m not sure you’ll be able to use a gyro sensor for that: gyro sensors drift with time, so you’ll end up having the same problem with misalignment…
Instead, I would recommend using a compass module like this one:
You can either mount it directly on your wifi antenna and measure the actual antenna direction of the antenna and compare it with the desired direction, and then make corrections with your servo. Or you can mount it on the arm that supports the antenna (or any another fixed part on your boat) to measure the boat direction, subtract it from the desired direction, and then tell the servo to move the difference between the two.
You would have to do some tests though, because the compass sensor can get magnetic interference from the surrounding metal objects.
If you want to use this approach, you would need to make a program to do these calculations. You can either do this with a microcontroller, like an Arduino, or do this as a program that runs on a computer.
Do you have a preference between the two? Do you have some experience with programming? If so, which languages do you know?
Hope this helps,
Unfortunately I’m not so good in programming. I see guys makes something like this for pan & tilt camera mounts. And I had hope that you have some ready sets or at list projects that i can apply in my idea?
I saw that DiaLFonZo recommended in another thread to use the MultiWii which has support for stabilized pan and tilt system.
If that doesn’t work for you, you can try using Phidget devices and FlowBotics Studio to control them:
In FlowBotics Studio, you can read the compass of the Phidget Spatial board (RB-Phi-232) board and calculate the value to send to the Phidget Servo board (included in RB-Rbo-166). FlowBotics Studio use a visual programming language that should make it easy to connect all these components.
Hope this helps,
