A Solar-Powered Autonomous Boat
YouTuber Clay Builds created an autonomous GPS boat that runs forever… as long as nothing breaks.
A vehicle’s range is typically limited by its battery and/or fuel capacity, but as YouTuber Clay Builds' latest project shows, his autonomous boat can theoretically run forever – at least when the sun is out. The boat uses solar panel as its deck, which provides power to a the battery, and a pair of BLDC thrust motors for thrust. Flotation is enabled by two pontoons made out of 4” PVC pipe. These are each cut at 48” to keep them roughly halfway above water, plus a bit extra for safety.
The boat mounts a GPS antenna on top of one of the pontoons, and a magnetometer on the other, arranged externally (and at some distance from the other electronics) to avoid interference. The main electronics are mounted in a waterproof box underneath the deck/solar panel, including an Arduino Pro Mini, RC receiver, and a microSD card reader. GPS coordinates are stored on the SD card for the boat to follow, and it also has a manual RC control mode.
After some initial bathtub testing, it was finally put in a lake at around 23:00 in the video, where it performed well to begin with, but eventually broke. Clay had planned ahead; however, and included accommodations for a tow strap on the boat, and brought a kayak the lake. It seems a bad ESC was at fault here, and hopefully the next iteration will be even better – perhaps with a sonar for underwater mapping!