Michael E. Holden
California State Maritime Academy Sabbatical Fall 2024
This report shares the results of my Fall 2024 Sabbatical project. It will get into the details pretty thoroughly, with links and files so I can find all the work in one place in the future, so feel free to skip around to the good parts. For a more visual feel you can follow the insta-blog at n3m0_the_robot_boat.
Continue reading “Surface Current Measurement and Route Optimization Using Autonomous Boats”I built N4N1 to learn the details of the ardupilot sailboat firmware. I have had a few student groups building similar vessels at work, and thought it would be worthwhile to go through the exercise myself. Plus I had a boat gathering dust that needed a job.
N4N1 uses the ardupilot sailboat firmware on a Matek flight controller, with external GPS, compass, and wind vane.
N4N1’s hull was designed and built by me in the previous century, and with the rig from an RC Laser, she sails autonomously on San Francisco Bay.
Continue reading “N4N1 the Autonomous Sailboat”
This project documents how to make a windvane to sense the wind direction. It was designed for an autonomous sailboat but could be used in other applications. The structure is mostly 3D printed and uses a gopro mount to attach to the hull. The main sensor is a magnetic encoder that outputs an analog voltage in the 0-5V range. For my application I used a voltage divider to bring that down to 0-2.5V because my autopilot is based on 3.3V logic. I also have an arduino program to output the vane angle as NMEA 0183 serial data; I don’t use this on my boat but it is a standard digital interface that might be helpful for others.
Continue reading “Electronic Windvane”This is mostly just to link the video I made. It shows how to run mission planner (ground control station) and start a simulation of an autonomous sailboat (SITL), and how to run the boat in autonomous modes, including tacking parameters and geofencing. Enjoy!
I had an email request to find this project from 2010… I updated the code too!
This project takes the pulse from a paddlewheel boat speed sensor and makes an NMEA output on the serial port. It should work with most through-hull speed transducers, and also with windspeed transducers too. The NMEA stream comes from the arduino serial port, so if you have a USB arduino you can hook it up to a laptop easily. If you want to hook it up to another NMEA instrument you’ll need something like a MAX232 chip to take the TTL logic from the serial port pins and convert them to RS-232 (or convert to RS-422 to meet the NMEA specification).
This is an update of an old project. Click the link to navigate to the Richmond Yacht Club’s Wednesday night beercan starting line. It uses your phone’s GPS info and system clock.
If you’re looking for my old site, sorry it got hacked and had to be put down.
You can email me (mholden at csum dot edu) if you are trying to find something specific.
