Sailing boat loiter
Good day.
I have this cute little project with my son to make a sailing boat with an automatic loiter button and two little motors, forcing the boat to always stay against the wind thanks to this bi-motor configuration.
How can we sense the wind direction and tell the two motors to always keep the boat in that direction ?
Thank you
you should start here
https://ardupilot.org/rover/docs/sailboat-home.html
Essentially you want to disable sailing mode and switch to motors. That will engage standard loiter so rather than sailing loiter where it tacks to stay in an area, it will hold position pointing into the wind (or current) using motors.
Thank you, nice link
I just learned about the word “wind vane” thanks to you.
Now I need to find a wind vane which can send a value to the apm
none of that will work with an APM controller its far too old. you need something newer with a f4 or h7 chip.
Does that mean that you know about a good and tested wind vane with digital signal ?
Not sure why you wrote that the apm would not work ?
The APM controller is not supported anymore as it uses an old 8 bit controller, it has not had a software update in almost 9 years so it doesnt have any of the sailing code. you need a modern controller with a F405 or H743 chip to be compatible with recent versions of ardupilot that has the sailing code.
OK. Kind of hurts as I had very successful stories with the APM 2.5 to 2.8 and managed to make some decent money out of them back in the days.
But you are right, reading at the F405, specs and knowing that ardupilot newer versions would not fit, what you suggest makes lots of sense.
Thanks for the tip.
Some things: F4 MCUs do (still) work, but due to flash size and processing power constraints they (a) can’t make use of all Ardupilot features, (b) can’t have all features included in the firmware at the same time, and (c) might be deprecated in future versions.
If you’re on a tight budget and you know what you need and don’t need they can be perfectly fine, but some really nice features like Lua scripting won’t work on a F4 MCU. And since it sounds like you want to use it as educational project with your boy, Lua could be a great thing to work with once your boat is complete.
All that to say, consider getting an autopilot with H7 MCU, they aren’t that much more expensive.