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[WalneyCol]

Hi, I'm a newbie here and was wondering if anyone has any experience of a sea-going project similar to mine.

To cut a long story short I live on an island and am in the final stages of putting together a very basic 4' x 2' RC catamaran powered by a car battery and a 12v boat trolling motor that's being built specifically to send out to sea on autonomous missions.

My eventual aim is to be able to pre-program of transmit real time mission details to the boat (probably using ham radio gear) which will set it off following a specified course wwhich may or may not be out of LOS. The boat will be carrying a small tethered ROV (i.e submarine type thingy) which it should be able to launch and recover autonomously.

In the short term however it will be operated by a regular RC setup (I've currently stolen the 2.4G Spektrum DX7 from my RC plane for it) and the the next steps will be to install FPV video gear so I can have a live close up feed from any one of multiple cameras one of which will be on the ROV and one of which will be used primarily to steer the boat while under way. I'm not anticipating many problems with the FPV side of things but at the same time I need to be thinking about an auto pilot system which will be capable ot storing a minimum of 100 waypoints (500 would be better) and I'm having a hard time finding an autopilot that's specifically designed for marine use. I'm aware of Harald Molle's "Ardupilot goes into the water" blog but the downside to Harald's project lays in the fact that he had to hack away at the Ardupilot code to get it to do what it does and I rather suspect I'm seriously lacking in that department.

So is anyone aware of a better alternative to the Ardupilot of know where I can buy an already-hacked version of it? Or failing that has anyone else used RC in a proper sea-going environment and if so are there any non-obvious problems you think I may encounter?

Many thanks for reading and I hope to meet some of you out on the water one day.

Col.