It is a family tradition to travel to an island called "Beaver Island" for each kid who becomes a teen. Off the coast of beaver island is a bay called "Iron Ore Bay". The reason it is called Iron Ore Bay is because an iron ore carrier by the name of "Betsy Smith" sank there and caused the entire body of water within the bay to become red with rust from the iron. It is part of the tradition for each kid to go diving to find the Betsy Smith, and to this day, no one has ever found it. I, Malachi, am on Beaver Island as I write this, and tomorrow I plan to be the first to find this with the help of the sea lemon. I am planning on having the sea lemon circle above the wreck of the ship and letting me snorkel it. BETSY SMITH Official no. : 2852 Type at loss : schooner-barge, wood Build info : 1873, Bailey Bros, Toledo Specs : 201x37x17, 723 t. Date of loss : 1873, Nov (7) Place of loss : Beaver Island Lake : Michigan Type of loss : storm Loss of life : none mentioned Carrying : 1,500 t. iron ore (thats a lot lol) Detail : Soon after leaving Escanaba, her tow steamer J. KELLEY became disabled, and the SMITH raised her sails and towed the steamer back in. She then struck off on her own, but was overtaken by a storm. Picked up by the steamer ANNIE YOUNG, she soon broke loose and was driven ashore. Wreckers put the largest available pumps aboard to try to pump her out, but to no avail. Owner: Shepherd, Henry & Co. As of the end of the season she was still on the beach. We are out here with life jackets and inflatables. We are planning on renting a Jeep and riding out to the south end of the island tomorrow. We already programmed the coordinates of the Betsy Smith, from google earth, into the sea lemon. We'll start it up and follow it to the Betsy.
Check back tomorrow for pictures and maybe a video of a ship that has been under the waves for one hundred and forty years.
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So we recently added a new prop to our boat so we could achieve a higher speed at lower power. When we brought it to our pond to test it, there was a catastrophic failure in boat. We don't really know what happened, but the boat just stopped moving mid way in the pond. We tried retrieving it by grabbing it with our tree saw, but it was not long enough. We decided to wait till the next morning to pick it up once it drifted to shore. When we (meaning my dad,) picked it up, it was full of water. Not everything was ruined since mostly everything in there was waterproof, but we did lose the Arduino. We decided to remake the arduino with a "nano arduino". There were a few errors, but we managed to get it working like the old one. The new navigation system is about one third the size and weight of the old one, so I guess that is quite an improvement. Although the old boat's brain has died, it still has its old heart. <3
Yes, this project is now officially called "Operation sea lemon". I made this video in Sony Vegas pro. Some of it is made to go faster so you don't waste time, so don't think that the boat is traveling at light speed. After taking a long break from working and an even longer break from posting on this blog, finally got our navigation working. We can now place waypoints that our boat can drive directly to using GPS coordinates. We loaded a library in arduino that allows the boat knows the distance between itself and the waypoint it is trying to reach. The boat can also tell which direction it is going, and the way it should be going allowing it to correct its course. The more its off, the more the rudder turns to correct it. Lets just say that its 5 degrees off its course. It will turn the rudder about 1 degree to correct it until its headed the right way again. Because it can calculate the distance between the boat and the waypoint, we set it to where the boat will stop following the current waypoint if it is within 20 feet and start following the next waypoint on the list. We tested the boat on our local pond and on a very small and busy lake a distance from us. Before on the lake, we walked the boat on land to see if it had a working navigation algorithm. Here are some photos that can satisfy your hunger for visuals: Heres the code for the navigation if you want it: ![]()
We plan on uploading an actual video tomorrow of the boat navigating. Stay tuned.
We needed to measure the power used by the boat at various power levels. The power used in Watts is equal to the current in Amps, multiplied by the Voltage in Volts. Power (Watts) = Voltage (Volts) X Current (Amps) We can use our multimeter to measure the voltage coming out of the battery. To measure current , we used a shunt resistor that has very low resistance so it doesn't slow the current down, but it creates a little voltage drop that we can measure with our multimeter. So we soldered connectors onto some wire and wired up our shunt resistor in series with the battery. We then took voltage and current readings at various power levels. Here is the shunt resistor: The shunt resistor has a stamp on it so you know that at 75mV you are seeing 5A.
So to calculate current through the shunt, you divide the mV by 75, then multiply by 5A to get current. When we took the readings, the voltage out of the battery was 7.6 V. So to calculate Power, you multiply the shunt current by 7.6 V. Here is the data we took: Power Level mV Amps Power (Watts) 27 7.5 0.5 3.8 29 10 0.67 5.1 31 12 0.8 6.1 33 15 1.0 7.6 35 18 1.2 9.1 This is enormously bad news!!! The boat will go 1.0 mph at power of 33, but will use 7.6Watts of power to do this... This will make it very difficult to make the boat solar and be able to maintain power through a whole 24 hours... we just cannot generate that much solar energy on this small boat. We might need a bigger boat that can carry more solar area to make the long trip. We will need to think about this. We are moving on to the navigation problem and we'll come back to this whole power issue. In the previous post we talked about how we loaded the boat and used the Arduino to measure the boat speed at different power levels. Our hope is that we can achieve 3 mph to overcome the currents of Lake Michigan, while using only 3 watts of power. Here is the data we recorded. ![]() This shows that when the boat is carrying 1090g of payload, it will go:
This is slower than we had hoped. We have no idea how many watts the boat is using at each power setting, so that is next. |
AuthorMalachi and Ezra's page where we build cool stuff and either break it, set fire to it, etc. in the name of science. Archives
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