Awesome
Not sure if that prop will be enough though, the currents in certain areas can get quite strong, and the size of the boat, all it'd take is a strong wave and it'll go under.
Still I wish it the best while it prepares for its voyage.
Raspberry Pi's journey to punters pockets has hardly gone swimmingly, but as it prepares to cross the Atlantic in a homemade autonomous boat - aptly dubbed FishPi - the budget Linux PC continues to make quite a splash in the tech pool. FishPi - the brainchild of enthusiast Greg Holloway - is a 20in long vessel that navigates …
Wow, an indetectably small, self-powered, autonomous vessel that can be programmed with a destination then just pushed off and it finds its own way there. Best of all, it's cheap. I wonder if the designer will be inundated with orders from exactly the sort of customers he doesn't want to deal with - but finds it impossible (or just unhealthy) to turn away.
That is, if it doesn't fall foul of the Gulf Stream and end up in Norway.
Really not up to the job - a lot of geocaches use tupperware, and the water always manages to get in - even the snap lock variant. Most geocachers use a plastic bag inside the tub to make sure everything stays dry.
Other than that, looks great. Hope they find space for a transmitter so we can track it's voyage.
I'm surprised you got downvoted for that comment. It was my second thought after, "whoever designed that has never sailed across an ocean." Oh, and I reckoned force 3 would be too much. Especially with a fetch that covers the atlantic.
And I have sailed across an ocean. The chances of getting even as far as the scillies without exceeding F3 are diminishingly small.
Best of luck though, far bigger budgetted projects have already failied this endeavour. (Although that in itself is of course not an indicator of the prospects for this one).
Sounds like you've managed to fry your board, or a compnent on it somewhere. My own Pi has had uptimes of over a week between boots, and then I've shut it down normally to refresh the disk image (and that's using the bleeding edge OpenELEC images, not the Debian stable images, with which I've had no stability issues either). Two usb devices plugged in, ethernet networking and an hdmi cable running at full HD.
No panics here!
> I suspect it's USB related
Could well be. My usually tame (if slow) Pi took an instant dislike to a cheap and nasty self-powered USB hub that I tried connecting to it. I didn't have to have anything plugged into the hub, it's mere presence on the USB was enough to turn the Pi into Crumble.
All the other hubs I've tried have been fine - just that one seem to cause problems.
If it heads west at 1 knot, and gets caught in a current heading north at 1 knot, then its route will be northwest.(*) A GPS allows it to navigate to course over ground for the shortest route. This would start off at something like 280 degrees and finish at something like 250 degrees to follow the great circle route.
If I was them though, i'd forget the great circle route and choose a tradewind route. The prop wont power it.
+/- adjustments for wind / routing etc.
... Really? To me it looks like a boat that's been built in a garden shed that someone has placed their lunch box on with a Pi placed inside it... No wires, no batteries, no solar panels, no steering rods, no propeller, no.....nothing.
If I go and dig out one of my sons polystyrene planes (you know, the slot together ones) and place my Pi next to it, could this be viewed as a PoC for flying across the Atlantic - I'll call it the PiPlane and submit to the internet.
At this size, it will only travel at 1 - 1 1/4 knots maximum speed. Will that be enough to outdo any currents and wind? Due to stability considerations, the solar cells will be fairly close to the water - more susceptable to being covered in salt and debris (reduction in power), and water damage.
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I've sailed across the Atlantic a couple of times, and reckon that if their programming were sufficient and they were very lucky the trade winds would do the vast majority of the work, if their setting off point was one of the canary islands. That way all the motor needs to do is to try to correct their course rather than bother making way.
The downside as I see it from the design is that the boat would spend most of it's time on it's side or upside down as the Atlantic rollers did their best to destroy the Tupperware. Thus it's little motor would do most of it's spinning when it had no resistance (was out of the water) and it's PV battery would spend not very long getting light to power the motor. I'd suggest more of a tube design surrounded by PV with 3 rotors that only operated when they were at the lowest point (mercury switch or gyro) so as not to waste power, and you'd need a rudder behind each one to give it something to steer with. The tube would also be a stronger design and should be easier to seal to prevent the water and salt getting in (as it inevitably will on boats).
Sadly this design is going to be smashed apart and sunk very quickly. Those rolling waves are generally 20' from tip to trough in the sorts of force 4-5 you usually see in the mid Atlantic. Also if they tried to set either design off from Blighty (or anywhere in mainland Europe for that matter) it wouldn't have the power to get past the tides let alone make any reasonable headway. The propulsive force here has to be the trade winds.
The Pi seems to draw somewhere between 200mA and 500mA which is quite hefty for this application and there doesn't seem to be any ultra-low power or 'sleep' modes of operation and nor is it particularly geared-up for power loss or power monitoring. It requires a mechanically attached SDHC Card for the OS which will likely prove far more problematic than soldered-on or in-chip flash memory. Most of what a Pi offers would seem to be redundant here, HDMI, USB, LAN, and what GPIO it does have is quite limited.
A traditional micro would seem to have been far more suitable. But good luck anyway; "because you can".
> The Pi seems to draw somewhere between 200mA and 500mA
With two plugged in USB peripherals it's up to 800ma; but that's basically nothing compared to the what his motor will be drawing.
The other problem I can see is that the Pi doesn't (yet) seem to have a real time kernel available, so latency might become a huge issue.
It's still cool though....
If the author had actually bothered to do some research instead of simply scraping the front page of the raspberryPi.org homepage - you know, something radical like going to the homepage of the FishPi project everyone would be aware that the boat in question is simply a proof of concept to see if it can be made to work and will be spending its life on considerably smaller bodies of water than the Atlantic - such as the local boating lake.