1.2 KiB
aberSailBot
SailBot is a university society I joined in my first year. They build and race robot sailboats. I joined the society as it seemed like a really interesting challenge building robots that have to deal with the insane variety of variables the outside world offers. Especially in the ocean where you rely on those to move.
I spent the first year in a team of 3 building a small boat we called "floating point". We started from a polystyrene hull and had to do a number of steps to build it, none of which any of us had any experience with:
- Coat the hull in resin
- Build a sail
- Design and 3d print parts
- Write ESP32 code to run it using a digital compass and gps
- Design a mechanism for its steering
We were building these along with other teams, the idea being at the end of the building period they would be tested and raced in a small still water pool near the local docks. By the end of the year only our team and one other had finished our boats so we tested them in a less competetive manner at the docks. Our boat failed to find a gps connection and was unable to said but the developer from the other team lent us his software which allowed remote control over wifi and that was used instead.
