Monthly Archives: May 2023

Solar-powered autonomous catamaran

I built a solar-powered catamaran. This is a project I made together with a friend. He also built his own boat with a similar design. We made the boat hulls together and then did our own implementations of the same basic idea. We also used a lot of parts we had laying around, including motors, ESCs, propellers, and old drone flight controllers running ArduRover software for autonomous GPS navigation.

The boats have a 60W solar panel that charges a small LiFePo4 battery that is then used to power the motors and electronics. My Boat uses a cheap PWM charge controller to charge the battery. It turned out that It was fairly easy to make a boat that is powered only by the sun. During our first test run, the boats consumed more than twice the energy that can be stored in the batteries, and the batteries were kept fully charged all the time by the sun.

The video above shows the first test runs. I made a few simple old RC boats before, but I don’t have much experience with boats. After this first test run and I already know a lot of things that can be improved and changed. I will continue to work on this project, mostly to try and improve the boat design to make it sail with more control, both in straight lines and during turns.

Maiden flight of my new ArduPlane

I built a new ArduPlane aircraft. It is a balsa airframe I designed and built for more experimentation with autonomous flight. I have taken everything a learned while building and flying my previous autonomous plane, the “ArduPlane 2020”, and tried to improve it. See more about the previous plane here on this page.

This new plane is slightly larger and more efficient than the previous one. This one glides better and is also more controllable. The control surfaces are larger and can move more. It also has dual elevators with individual servos for redundancy. This plane can also carry small payloads or bigger batteries for longer flight time.