Testing manual control the day before Sailbot.
On Sunday, Dominic Guri, Andrew Schneer, Duncan Swain, and Joshua Prince represented Tufts Robotic Sail Team during the welcome and preliminary testing day for Sailbot 2013. From morning till late afternoon, Andrew and Dominic worked on completing Arduino code to be used for sailing our boat in autonomous mode.
Dominic and Andrew finish coding the software for autonomous mode.
Manual control of our boat worked OK. After our maiden voyage last week, we mounted the electronics in a waterproof cellphone case and Tupperware. This makes our boat stern heavy, which we compensated for by adding ballast (rocks) in the bow.
Electronics fit inside a waterproof cellphone case and Tupperware.
We are now continually debugging code. Autonomous testing of our boat at first seemed promising, but we soon realized that our system controlling the main sheets’ trim is not working. Further debugging after the race suggests that we are not interpreting our wind sensor readings correctly. Hopefully we can resolve this issue before our first event–the Navigation Test–Monday morning at 11 AM.