A bright orange sailboat with solar panels on the wing sail and the hull of the craft. A number of protuberances from the wing are visible containing instruments and radio equipment.

Saildrones Searching The Sea For Clues To Hurricane Behavior

July 29, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 26 Comments

Hurricanes can cause widespread destruction, so early forecasting of their strength is important to protect people and their homes. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is using saildrones to get better data from inside these monster storms.

Rising ocean temperatures due to climate change are causing hurricanes to intensify more rapidly than in the past, although modeling these changes is still a difficult task. People on shore need to know if they’re in store for a tropical storm or a high strength hurricane to know what precautions to take. Evacuating an area is expensive and disruptive, so it’s understandable that people want to know if it’s necessary.

Starting with five units in 2021, the fleet has gradually increased in size to twelve last summer. These 23ft (7m), 33ft (10m), or 65ft (20m) long vessels are propelled by wing sails and power their radio and telemetry systems with a combination of solar and battery power. No fossil fueled vessel can match the up to 370 days at sea without refueling that these drones can achieve, and the ability to withstand hurricane winds and sea conditions allow scientists an up-close-and-personal look at a hurricane without risking human lives.

We’ve covered how the data gets from a saildrone to shore before, and if you want to know how robots learn to sail, there’s a Supercon talk for that.

Thanks to [CrLz] for the tip!

How Does A Sail Drone Bring Home Hurricane Footage In Record Time?

October 5, 2021 by Ryan Flowers 11 Comments

It is unlikely that as a young lad [Richard Jenkins] would had have visions of sailing into the eye of a Category-4 hurricane. Yet that’s exactly what he’s done with the Explorer 1045, an uncrewed sailing vehicle built by his company, Saildrone. If that weren’t enough, footage from the vessel enduring greater than 120 MPH (almost 200 km/h) winds and 50 foot (15 M) waves was posted online the very next day, and you can see it below the break. We’re going to take a quick look at just two of the technologies that made this possible: Advanced sails and satellite communication. Both are visible on Explorer 1045’s sibling 1048 as seen below:

Saildrone Explorer 1048, a sibling of Explorer 1045, each one of five vessels equipped with a "hurricane wing" — Saildrone Explorer 1048, a sibling of Explorer 1045, each one of five vessels equipped with a “hurricane wing”

The most prominent feature of course is the lack of a traditional sail. You see, from 1999-2009, [Richard Jenkins] was focused on setting the land world speed record for a wind powered vehicle. He set that record at 126.1 mph by maturing existing sail wing technology. [Richard] did away with conventional rigging and added a boom with a control surface on it, much like the fuselage and empennage of a sailplane.

Instead of adjusting rigging, the control surface could be utilized to fly the wing into its optimal position while using very little energy. [Richard] has been able to apply this technology at his company, Saildrone. The 23 foot Explorer vessel and its big brothers are the result.

How is it that the world was treated to the view from inside the eye of a hurricane only a day after the video was recorded? If you look at the stern of the vessel, you can see a domed white cylinder. It is a satellite communication base station called the Thales VesseLINK. Thales is one of the partner companies that built the satellites for the Iridium NEXT fleet, which has 66 operational satellites in Low Earth Orbit. The Iridium Certus service uses its L-Band (1.6 GHz) signal to provide up to 352 kbps of upload speed and 704 kbps down. While not blazing fast, the service is available anywhere in the world and is reliable because it is not prone to rain fade and other weather based interference.

With just these two recent innovations, the Explorer 1045 was able to sail to the eye of a hurricane, record footage and gather data, and then ship it home just hours later. And we’re hardly exploring the tip of the iceberg. More than just sailboat based cameras, these scientific instruments are designed to survive some of the harshest environments on the planet for over a year at a time. They are a marvel of applied engineering, and we’re positive that there are some brilliant hacks hiding under that bright orange exterior.

If uncrewed sailing vessels float your boat, you might also enjoy this autonomous solar powered tugboat, or that time a submarine ran out of fuel and sailed home on bed sheets.

Continue reading “How Does A Sail Drone Bring Home Hurricane Footage In Record Time?” →

Hurricane Hunting From Outer Space

September 27, 2021 by Al Williams 8 Comments

If you live in the right part of the world, you spend a lot of the year worried about hurricanes or — technically — tropical cyclones. These storms carry an amazing amount of power and can change your life. However, we are relatively spoiled these days compared to the past. It is hard to imagine, but there was a time when a hurricane’s arrival was something of a mystery. Sure, ships would report what they encountered, but finding exact data about a hurricane was a bit hit or miss. We often talk about space technology making life better. Weather forecasting — especially for tropical storms — is one place where money spent in space has made life much better on Earth.

The lack of data about storms can be fatal. The Great Galveston hurricane of 1900 took around 12,000 lives. It might have had a better outcome, but forecasters missed where the storm was heading, announcing that it would go from Cuba to Florida which was just totally wrong. Not that a forecaster couldn’t make a mistake today, but with aircraft and satellite coverage, you’d know very quickly that the prediction was wrong and you’d sound the alarm. In truth, the prediction models have become very good over the years, so the chances of this happening today are virtually nil in any event. But being able to precisely locate and track storms helps reduce the impact of the storm and also feeds data into the models that makes them even more accurate for the future.

Continue reading “Hurricane Hunting From Outer Space” →

The Hurricanes Are Coming

August 31, 2020 by Bryan Cockfield 8 Comments

It’s hurricane season in the northern hemisphere right now, and plenty of news and weather organizations remain dedicated to alerting people if a storm is about to impact their area. There’s no shortage of ways to receive this information, either. We all have our favorite weather app or forecasting site, and there are emergency alerts to cell phones, TV, and radio stations as well. If none of that suits you, though, you can also roll out your own weather alert readerboard.

[Damaged Dolphin] built a weather alert readerboard using a Raspberry Pi and a 64×128 LED matrix. The Raspberry Pi runs Raspbian and uses a HAT from Adafruit, and once connected to the internet pulls down weather information for a specific area using custom python code. From there it can display any emergency weather alerts instantly on the readerboard screen including alerts for hurricanes. It does rely on data from the National Weather Service though, so if that is not available in your area some modifications will need to be made to the code.

While he notes that you probably shouldn’t rely on his non-professional python code exclusively when getting weather information, it would still be a good way of retrieving information about weather events without having to refresh a browser all the time. Once the storms have passed though, be sure you’re prepared for the days following.

Thanks to [b00tfa|l] for the tip!

Continue reading “The Hurricanes Are Coming” →

Austere Engineering Hack Chat

January 20, 2020 by Dan Maloney 6 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, January 22 at noon Pacific for the Austere Engineering Hack Chat with Laurel Cummings!

For most of us, building whatever it is that needs building is something that occurs in relative comfort and abundance. Sure, there are cold workshops and understocked parts bins to deal with, but by and large, we’re all working in more or less controlled environments where we can easily get to the tools and materials we need to complete the job.

But not all engineering is done under such controlled conditions. Field operations often occur miles from civilization, and if whatever you need is not in the back of the truck, it might as well not exist. At times like this, the pressure is on to adapt, improvise, and overcome to get the job done, especially if people’s lives and well-being are at stake.

All of this is familiar territory for Laurel Cummings, an electrical engineer and an associate at Building Momentum, a technology development and training concern based in Virginia. Her job is to get out in the field and work with the company’s mainly military and corporate clients and help them deal with the challenges of austere environments, including disaster response efforts.

From a North Carolina beach ravaged by Hurricane Florence to the deserts of Kuwait, Laurel has had to think her way out of more than a few sticky situations. Join us as we discuss what it takes to develop and deploy field-expedient solutions under less-than-ideal situations, learn how to know when good enough is good enough, and maybe even hear a few war stories too.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, January 22 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

This Hurricane Uses A Novel Technique

October 5, 2019 by Jenny List 16 Comments

You’ve probably heard of the brave pilots, the so-called ‘few’, that took to the air in their Supermarine Spitfires and saved the day during the Battle of Britain. It’s a story that contains a lot of truth, but as is so often the case, it masks a story with a bit more complexity. Those pilots did scramble across the airfields of Southern England back in the summer of 1940, but more of them went into battle behind the controls of a Hawker Hurricane than its more glamorous stablemate.

The Hurricane might have been eclipsed by the Spitfire in the public’s eye, but not for [Marius Taciuc], who’s made a fully-functional RC model of one. Normally that wouldn’t be worthy of our attention, but in this case he’s employed a rather fascinating construction technique. He’s recreated the doped-fabric skin of the original by 3D-printing the frame of the aircraft and covering it in heat-shrink film, making this a very rare bird indeed.

The video below takes us through the steps including the development of the frame in a CAD package based on a tracing of a 2D aircraft picture, fitting the film, and finally attempts at flight that are unfortunately foiled by inappropriate wheel choice. But the short flight and crash does demonstrate that this construction method is durable, which leads on to our interest in it. While it evidently makes a functional aircraft, there are other applications that could benefit from such a lightweight and strong combination of materials.

[Marius] actually created a model of the somewhat more photogenic Spitfire using a similar technique, though as far as we can tell, that one has remained grounded. Incidentally, these pages have been previously graced by Hurricanes of the non-PLA variety. Continue reading “This Hurricane Uses A Novel Technique” →

Hackaday Links: September 1, 2019

September 1, 2019 by Dan Maloney 10 Comments

The sun may be spotless, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t doing interesting things. A geomagnetic storm is predicted for this weekend, potentially giving those at latitudes where the Northern Lights are not common a chance to see a cosmic light show. According to SpaceWeather.com, a coronal hole, a gap in the sun’s atmosphere that can let the solar wind escape, is about to line up with Earth. The last time this hole was on the Earth-facing side of the sun, the resultant storm gave aurora as far south as Colorado. So if you’re in any of the northern tier states, you might want to find somewhere with dark skies and a good view to the north this weekend.

It’s not only space weather that’s in the news, but weather-weather too. Hurricane Dorian will probably make landfall as a Category 4 storm, probably along Florida’s Atlantic coast, and probably in the middle of the night on Monday. That’s a lot of uncertainty, but one thing’s for sure: amateur radio operators will be getting into the action. The Hurricane Watch Net will activate their net for Dorian on Saturday afternoon at 5:00 PM Eastern time, ready to take reports from stations in the affected area. Not a ham? You can still listen to the live feed once the net activates.

Hams aren’t the only ones getting geared up for Dorian, though. Weather satellite enthusiasts are pointing their SDRs at the sky and grabbing some terrifyingly beautiful pictures of Dorian as it winds up. Some of the downloaded images are spectacular, and if you’ve got an SDR dongle and a couple of pieces of coat hanger wire, you too can spy on Dorian from any number of satellites.

Speaking of which, over on r/RTLSDR, someone has done a little data mining and shown that NOAA 15 is still very much alive. u/amdorj plotted the scan motor current draw and found that it steadily decreased over time, possibly indicating that the bearings aren’t as worn as previously thought. We recently covered the story of the plucky satellite that’s almost two decades past its best-by date; here’s hoping our report on its death was greatly exaggerated.

In one of the weirder bits of marketing we’ve seen lately, NASA decided to name a rock on Mars after septuagenarian rockers The Rolling Stones. The golf ball size rock was blasted about a meter across the Martian landscape when the Mars InSight lander touched down in 2018, leaving a small scar in the dust. The stone had obviously rolled, so phone calls were made and one thing led to another, and before you know it, Robert Downey Jr. is making the announcement before a Stones concert at the Rose Bowl, right in JPL’s backyard. There’s even a cute animation to go along with it. It’s a nice piece of marketing, but it’s not the first time the Stones have been somewhat awkwardly linked to the technology world. We dare you not to cringe.

We’ll finish up today with something not related to space. As Al Williams recently covered, for about fifty bucks you can now score a vector network analyzer (VNA) that will do all sorts of neat RF tricks. The NanoVNA sounds like a great buy for anyone doing RF work, but its low price point and open-source nature mean people are finding all kinds of nifty uses for it. One is measuring the length of coax cables with time-domain reflectometry, or TDR. Phasing antenna arrays? the NanoVNA sounds like the perfect tool for the job.