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.