Autopilot for Ariadne

Autopilotti työpöydällä

Ariadne needs autopilot. When sailing alone, the rudder cannot be left free for a long time so the autopilot has been on thoughts.

Because their prices in the Ariadne size range (12.5m and 11 tons) are quite high I started looking for other options. Since Ariadne already has OpenCPN in use and has proven to work well, I looked for related autopilot stuff. “http://pypilot.org” , an open source autopilot made with Python, was found. It works in a Raspberry, integrates with openCPN and in addition to that, of course, needs a work unit and its controller, which is often made with Arduino. In addition to the driver, the story related to the driver can be found here: “https://hackaday.io/project/168592-opencpn-chart-plotter-w-autopilot-and-waypoints" . I started the autopilot project by making a motor controller. If it works then I can later look for a suitable commercial work unit as it would have an unnecessary amount of engineering needed at the moment. Behind the link above was found a slightly modified engine driver code from the original pypilot project. The result was Arduino Nano, and the display that helps the development phase in particular changed to ST7789 based, which required a slight change in the code. Now it works so next I need to connect a Raspberry Pi to it!

Arduino työyksikön ohjaimena

Raspberry Pi Zero W