Hello fellow robot enthusiasts!
For the past few months I have been working on a robotic boat, as you can see in this video of it’s maiden voyage (pic below): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_-jTp1Bfso
Well, actually it is a modular “brain” and thruster system that can be mounted on anything small that floats (think surfboard, paddle board, kayak, and so on). For the moment, it is mounted on an old boogie board that a friend was going to chuck in the bin. I am writing up the build docs and BOM and for now it is good enough. The electronics are housed in an IP65 junction box and they are mounted on 5 mm craft plywood that I cut with my 4 yr old in an attempt to keep her occupied for 15 minutes during lockdown. I am designing 3D printed mounting surfaces for the electronics in the enclosure, but that will take a bit of time. For now, it works!
This boat uses a Radiolink Pixhawk from Robot Shop. I am also not 100% happy with this. I had a lot of trouble getting the telemetry radios working. I have a Holybro Pixhawk 4 and my next step, after the new enclosure mounts, will be to swap out the Radiolink knock off for something a bit better. Either the Holybro or perhaps a Cube. We shall see.
Briefly, the rest of the core components include 2 x Blue Robotics T200 thrusters and their Basic ESCs. For Tx/Rx I am using FrSky X9 Lite and X8R. It runs off a 4S 5000 mAh LiPo and I just got some decouplers from Mikrocopter to run 2 LiPos in parallel.
I’ll post the build docs and BOM soon!