FYI for Arduboat enthusiasts

Just an example of what Droneships can do.

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I think Ardurover would be totaly capable of such a mission, just need the hardware that will stand up to the beating of 200 days at sea

That is a beast of a boat. Comm link via satellite I guess

Ah I see that Saildrone changed the design of the wing. This square one looks a bit odd.

Great accomplishment and nice that they made all the collected data publicly available.

Slightly tangential but I have been thinking we should do some SITL testing to see if AP can handle motoring/sailing around the world. There’s at least one user who is planning to send a drone boat between North American and Western Europe. I think we might uncover a few issues. For example this issue regarding distance calculations.

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I certainly want to look at some longer range stuff, was thinking of setting up a pixhawk for ages see if we hit any issues when running for weeks at a time. Things like a very minimal heart beat for using satellite telemetry, some sort of battery level awareness for solar powered stuff like a hibernation mode. Log fille size i think is a issue also i think, we need to start a new file before it get above 4gb.

The main issue is getting reliable hardware, especially on a tight budget.

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By the way, when using satellite telemetry (like this one) I think we can use the new message-interval feature to greatly reduce the required bandwidth down to just the bare necessities.

Running hardware for a few weeks to see what happens is also a good test. Some bad things should surely happen (like the dataflash filling up) although most won’t be fatal to the vehicle nor difficult to overcome I hope.

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It’s not only square, but likely fixed, too (non-rotating) since it’s downwind all the way around Antarctica anyways.