Solar Panel for the BlueBoat

Thank you very much for doing that, that’s great to hear.

My aim is to have a camera on a blue boat film offshore wind turbines and take metocean data and remain in the offshore wind farm for long periods.

The camera would gimbal and zoom to image multiple parts of the turbines for diagnostic purposes. At some point, this will entail dynamically updating the waypoint navigation through vision based processing in order to take specific POV and for collision avoidance.

I plan as a first approach to mount the camera on the mounting arm of the T500.
The IP waterproof camera you suggested in this blogpost seems to be great blueboat-camera-installation : the SplashDrone 4 GC3-S Waterproof 3-Axis Gimbal 4K Camera
As a first approach I plan on using a random USB action camera (h264) and work on the software, and then decide which camera fits best (low light capabilities, thermal … ) .

Regarding power generation, given that I am designing a system for the North Sea sun, continuous operations is obviously not feasible. I need to figure out by testing the kind of power generation I can get and design my system around that. I will probably try to fit as big of a solar panel as possible.

The first prototype’s aim are thus to be able to loiter autonomously at sea and at set times every day be able to be directly controlled through the starlink.