Woolastook Navigation Challenge Parts II, III, and IV

One of the things I got around to adding this past week was a nice little on / off motorcycle switch with a blue "on" light for controlling power to the thrusters' (+12 V power supply):

I also added a check in the main software for AMOS to look for a high to low transition in this switched voltage and this tells the program to close and the Raspberry Pi to reboot itself. This makes it easier for me to re-establish a Bluetooth link to the boat later. The switch itself makes recovering from mishaps a lot better, as I no longer have to wrestle with the hatch or fumble with my phone while trying to avoid falling out of the kayak.

Three attempts were made this week to complete the Woolastook challenge (the same route from last week). The first test had some issues in and around the cove with following the wrong heading... basically if the heading was off by more than about 10 degrees it would crash into the shore. I did a sort of crude 8-point compass calibration after that, and then re-tested, with the following result:

This second test was pretty good on the trip out, but crashed into the shore a number of times on the way back. Some of the crashes actually looked pretty hard and bent one of the solar panel rails a bit, but AMOS kept functioning and was able to extract itself from the shore each time, until near the end when it got securely stuck in some overhanging branches near the shore. The blue path of the boat shows how it would sometimes set out at an invalid heading, and then gradually correct its heading as it got closer to the waypoint. This observation gave me the idea to try splitting up the course (in AMOS' navigation software) into 10 interpolated stages between the main waypoints. The result (the 4th and finally successful) Woolastook challenge is shown below:

There was still one close call on this last test where AMOS nearly crashed into the shore, and there were some obvious problems with consistently maintaining a desired direction, especially when going into or perpendicular to the wind, which was quite strong for this test. I made some improvements today to the software used for trimming the propeller speeds though, so I think that will help a lot to maintain a more straight course. It looked promising in the pool, and I will get back to the river in a couple of days probably to try it out.