boat

83 Articles

Unmanned Sailboat Traverses The North Atlantic

September 7, 2018 by 21 Comments

Sailboats have been traversing the Atlantic Ocean since before 1592, sailing through sunshine, wind, and rain. The one thing that they’ve all had in common has been a captain to pilot the ship across this vast watery expanse, at least until now. A company called Offshore Sensing has sailed an unmanned vessel all the way from Canada to Ireland.

The ship, called the Sailbuoy, attempted the journey last year as well but only made it about halfway before the mission was abandoned. This year, however, the voyage was finally completed, and this craft is officially the first unmanned ship to cross the Atlantic Ocean. The journey took about 80 days using sails and a small set of solar panels to drive the control electronics.

Using this technology, the company can investigate wave activity in specific areas of the ocean without having to send out a manned vessel to install a permanent buoy. The sailbuoy simply uses its autonomy to stay in a particular patch of ocean. There have been other missions that the sailbuoy has been tasked with as well, such as investigating the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. With a reliable craft like this, it becomes much easier, safer, and less expensive to explore the ocean’s surface.

Thanks to [Andy] for the tip!

RC Boat Goes Brushless For Speed & Reliability

August 24, 2018 by 17 Comments

Remote control boats can be great fun, and come in all manner of forms. There are unpowered sailcraft, speedboats that scream under the power of internal combustion, and of course, those that move under electric power. The brushless motor revolution of the past 20 years in particular has proven capable of creating some exciting RC watercraft, and [Matt K] decided he wanted to get on board.

[Matt] had owned a Kyosho Jetstream 1000 for several years, but found the nitro engine to be temperamental and not the most fun for high-jinx down at the lake. An old-school brushed motor setup with mechanical speed control similarly failed to excite. However, after experiencing the power of brushless in RC planes, [Matt] knew what he had to do.

Using an online calculator, [Matt] determined that his earlier nitro powerplant was putting out roughly 900 watts. When it came to going brushless, he decided to spec a Turnigy powerplant with twice as much power, along with the requisite speed controller. There was some work to do to integrate the new motor with the original propeller driveshaft and water cooling system, but in the end [Matt] ended up with a much faster boat that is a lot less hassle to set up and run.

Perhaps though, your RC boat needs brains, over brawn? Perhaps it’s time to look at autonomy…

Video after the break.

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Build A Boat With Your Buddies

July 20, 2018 by 20 Comments

It’s probably a dream common to many groups of friends among the Hackaday readership: go away together to a sunny island some time in the summer, take a load of beer and maybe a BBQ, and build something. Some of us get close to it at hacker camps such as Toorcamp or EMF, but few do it as well as [KristianKalm] and his friends. Their time on an island resulted in a boat, and what a boat it is!

To be fair, this is not a craft you’d sail the high seas in, its unique hull design rendered in single-skin plywood might have some stability issues and probably would have difficulty maintaining structural integrity in a high sea. But it’s perfect for their summer time backwater, with its electric outboard, steering wheel, and seat from a Russian saloon car.

The plans are fairly simple, cut from two sheets of ply it has an angular pointed front, sloping sides, and a fairly narrow bottom. Our experience with river boats would have led to a wider flat-bottomed hull, but this one looks stable enough for their purposes. Everything is held together with PVA glue and extra pieces of wood over the joints, something that amazingly keeps the water at bay. It is fairly obviously a rather basic and ever some might say rather ugly boat, but we’d guess there are few readers who wouldn’t want to give it a spin as part of a summer holiday.

If this has caught your fancy, don’t panic, the Northern Hemisphere still has some summer left, and all you need to do is find a plastic barrel!

Thanks [Keith Olson] for the tip!

Sparky, The Electric Boat

September 15, 2017 by 13 Comments

They say the two best days of a boat owner’s life are the day that they buy the boat and the day they sell it. If you built your boat from scratch though, you might have a few more good days than that. [Paul] at [ElkinsDIY] is no stranger to building boats, but his other creations are a little too heavy for him to easily lift, so his latest is a fully electric, handmade boat that comes in at under 30 pounds and is sure to provide him with many more great days.

While the weight of the boat itself is an improvement over his older designs, this doesn’t include the weight of the batteries and the motor. To increase buoyancy to float this extra weight he made the boat slightly longer. A tiller provides steering and a trolling motor is used for propulsion. As of this video, the boat has a slight leak, but [Paul] plans to shore this up as he hammers out the kinks.

The boat is very manageable for one person and looks like a blast for cruising around the local lakes. Since it’s built with common tools and materials virtually anyone should be able to build something similar, even if you don’t have this specific type of plastic on hand.  And, while this one might not do well in heavy wind or seas, it’s possible to build a small one-person boat that can cross entire oceans.

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Building A Motorized Barrel Boat

August 14, 2017 by 24 Comments

[Rinoa Super-Genius] shows us in a video how to build a crude motorized barrel boat using only a few parts, including pontoons for extra buoyancy and stabilisation.

Building a barrel boat is simple. All you really need is a plastic barrel, scrap wood, PVC pipe with end caps, a battery, and a trolling motor. Of course, you could go even further and build your own trolling motor too.

The video shows the process of building the boat. You start of by cutting the barrel in two, making some calculations of water displacement in order to add the pontoons in the correct positions. These are just held in place with scrap wood screwed into the barrel. Connect the trolling motor to a battery and you’re done.

This isn’t obviously the best looking DIY boat out there, nor does it claim to be, but it can be built on a tight budget. If you have the right parts lying around, you could even build it for free.

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Going Digital: Upgrading A Boat’s Analog Gauge

August 1, 2017 by 16 Comments

The odds are that many of you do not own a boat that you get to tinker around with. [Mavromatic] recently acquired one that had — much to his consternation — analog gauges. So in order to get his ship ship-shape, he built himself a custom digital gauge to monitor his vessel’s data.

Restricted to the two-inch hole in his boat’s helm, trawling the web for displays turned up a 1.38-inch LCD display from 4D Systems. Given the confined space, a Teensy 3.2 proved to be trim enough to fit inside the confined space alongside a custom circuit board — the latter of which includes some backup circuits if [mavromatic] ever wanted to revert to an analog gauge.

Two days of acclimatization to the display’s IDE and he had enough code to produce a functional display right when the parts arrived.

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Autonomous Boat Sails The High Seas

July 30, 2017 by 13 Comments

As the human population continues to rise and the amount of industry increases, almost no part of the globe feels the burdens of this activity more than the oceans. Whether it’s temperature change, oxygen or carbon dioxide content, or other characteristics, the study of the oceans will continue to be an ongoing scientific endeavor. The one main issue, though, is just how big the oceans really are. To study them in-depth will require robots, and for that reason [Mike] has created an autonomous boat.

This boat is designed to be 3D printed in sections, making it easily achievable for anyone with access to a normal-sized printer. The boat uses the uses the APM autopilot system and Rover firmware making it completely autonomous. Waypoints can be programmed in, and the boat will putter along to its next destination and perform whatever tasks it has been instructed. The computer is based on an ESP module, and the vessel has a generously sized payload bay.

While the size of the boat probably limits its ability to cross the Pacific anytime soon, it’s a good platform for other bodies of water and potentially a building block for larger ocean-worthy ships that might have an amateur community behind them in the future. In fact, non-powered vessels that sail the high seas are already a reality.

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