I built a Blue Boat today, through the accelerometer, compass, and motor calibrations.
First of all, the whole experience has been 9+ on a scale of 1-10. (And that is high praise coming from me.)
The only issue I had was that one of the M6x14’s has fouled threads. Good thing for that small bag of spare parts!
The other comment I’ll make is that in the section “Check Motor Directions,” my “propellor wind” was blowing toward the bow (backwards). I went to " Reversing a Motor Direction" via Servo, but then it occurred to me to check that the LH prop was on the port side. It was not. Perhaps the instructions should be changed to add a note to check the propellor left-rightedness before changing the Servo settings.
Could you help me understand how exactly you calibrated the compass?
I’m having trouble getting the compass to calibrate on my BlueBoat. The first time I did it was inside and it took about an hour and a half spinning it randomly on a chair until the bar filled up, but then only one compass was barely in the green, one on the low side of yellow, and the other in the red. After trying to do a ‘test flight’ it failed pre-arm due to compass calibration not being good enough. I’ve redone this process now outside in a parking lot, even spinning it with the nose up and on all sides since it says “spin randomly on all axes”, however I can’t seem to get it to calibrate well enough, plus it’s exhausting trying spin it for an hour whenever I’m carrying it on a side axis. Any information on how you went about calibrating it exactly would be helpful. Thanks so much for your time.
We tied ours to a mechanical bull down at the saloon. (Just kidding). Seriously, it took a while for two of us, one holding each cross bar. We also did it (not good) by removing the pod cover and rotating it sans boat. It will need to be done again once we load it up, full boat, full weight. I like the chair idea. I’m also thinking of using my climbing rope and hanging it from a tree branch. (Oh, and we are using a solar panel, so we either need to counter-wind the circuit layout, or we need to study the deviation that occurs with the current flow switched on and off.)
I might have to try my climbing rope too since I’ve been getting stuck at about little over halfway on my progress bar recently. Just to clarify, you didn’t spin it perpendicular to the ground or at an angle, just clockwise/counterclockwise parallel to ground?
No, to make it work you must rotate around X, Y, and Zed. With both hands on the crossbar, close your eyes and envision rowing a kayak around the West end of Kauai. You can look it up under “soft iron calibration.”