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successful airboat with apm 2.6

Posted by Guy Van Rentergem on October 27, 2015 at 10:00am

Hello Arduboat skippers

https://youtu.be/80TgolR7aeI

Here is a video about an rc airboat with an apm 2.6 controller and the latest version of ArduRover software. Only a minimal tweaking was necessary for a rock solid track. The speed of the boat is 3 km/h. It's purpose is mapping the bottom of an acid lake. So no metal parts in the water and only air propulsion. The boat is covered with 5 layers of epoxy paint. In a previous life it was a bait boat.

It still has to be equipped with a sonar. Do you guys have any ideas about what sonar would be suitable?

Thanks

Guy Van Rentergem

Belgium

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Comments

  • Guy Van Rentergem November 13, 2015 at 8:04am

    @Enno

    Two things which keep the boot on track:

    1) The boat itself ;-) It has two fins. Without these It sails like a drunk captain.

    3702124203?profile=original

    2) And tuning the APM's parameters. The most important one was NAVL1_PERIOD. But here is a list of the other tweaked params:

    NAVL1_PERIOD 30 seconds
    STEER2SRV_P 1.5
    STEER2SRV_D 0.08
    STEER2SRV_TCONST 0.8
    WP_RADIUS 2 m
    CRUISE_SPEED 0.8 m/s
    Cruise_THROTTLE 30

    The electronics are the standard APM 2.6, 3DR GPS and 400 MHz data link. Nothing special.

    3702124026?profile=original

    I'm still working on which sonar to use... 

  • Enno Bokkels November 13, 2015 at 4:35am

    Great to see the perfect coursekeeping. 

    @Guy, can you also share some more details of your boat, the equipment used and the interface made? I'm asking because I did already a few attempts to implement my own APM, although not very succesfull. Probaly some pictures already do help a lot.

    By the way, the following discussion might be of help for your transducer question:

    http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/the-ardupilot-controlled-transd...

  • Guy Van Rentergem November 2, 2015 at 1:21pm

    The second day of testing the air boat

    https://youtu.be/LcM_Vo4cAZA

  • Admin
    Thomas J Coyle III October 30, 2015 at 3:19pm

    @Guy,

    Here is the page on my RSV Project where I added a Garmin Intelliducer to my RSV. It is spread over a number of pages.

  • Troy Gere October 30, 2015 at 2:34pm

    For an easy to deploy and compact system take a look at the Garmin Intelliducer

  • Ouroboros October 29, 2015 at 6:31pm

    As I understand it, conventional reactreational boat sonar transducers can be mounted within the hull, provide you graft a PVC tube to the inner hull, fill the tube with some medium (mineral oil or distilled water?), place the transducer into the tube, top off the tube with more medium, then seal it with a screw on cap. Usually the transducer is mounted inside the cap with the wire passing through the cap to make installation and maintenance easier.

  • Guy Van Rentergem October 27, 2015 at 1:38pm

    Here is an image showing how nice the boat keeps it track

    3702115302?profile=original

  • Admin
    Thomas J Coyle III October 27, 2015 at 12:32pm

    @Guy,

    Nice work! Well done.

    Regards,

    TCIII AVD

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