Projects

Here some past and current projects, there are many many more but these are the only documented ones ;) at least so far. The new ones aim for a small old and cheap sailboat in spe ;)

Barograph

The air pressure is one of the main data to look at and get an idea what the weather is gonna be in the near future. So it would be nice to see the pressure trend over the past hours and days. Especially if the pressure drops 140Pa per hour you are in for a storm. There are the very expensive barographs that record the pressure history on a paper role and some expensive digital ones. Most little weather stations got a small bar graph displaying the history over the past day or two, but not with very good resolution.
I wanted to use an Arduino and searching on the internet I found a couple of applications, basically going back to the same idea and project, so I used the same as a base and modified it for my needs and liking.
This here is the prototype with the materials I had on hand, i.e. had to made my own buttons etc. since we are isolated from the outside world for 8.5 months, so nothing will get in until November. But I like the buttons ;) I want to get a display where you can turn off the back light and therefore save quite some power.




And here is a preliminary version of the code.

Arduino GPS

Under all the arduino stuff I got over the years and kept down here I came across 2 GPS shields and wanted to try them out, so I build a little GPS with display that will in cooperate in the Sailboat Cockpit. Power consumption is only 160mA so not too bad, including the display.



under construction

Marine Diesel Monitoring

The idea here is to have some more engine data of a marine diesel, like various temperatures, water flow rate, RPM, maybe engine runtime. Since I'm waiting for parts that will be not be finished until next year.

under construction

Sailboat Cockpit

Once I'm done here at the Pole, I'm looking into buying a cheap (old) sailboat in the 33ft range. Since there are some things I would like to have and I know the boats I'm looking for won't have it, I'm building a little sailboat cockpit, with the above instruments, a good battery monitor, solar charge monitor, plenty of USB charging ports etc.
Some units will be commercial once but there will be 3 or 4 arduinos with displays be incooperated as well.
All will be in a homemade main panel about 600x200x70mmm with the actual units as panels as well so they can be rearranged within the main panel depending where it will be installed in the boats.
Again this year is the main design and next year will be the final assembly once I got the many parts I already ordered.

under construction

Remote Control

This project I started a while ago. The problem there were no compact cameras that had a wireless remote (was kind of before gopro etc.) and the only ones that actually had one were based on infrared, i.e. they worked only directional (you had to point the remote right to the remote sensor of the camera. Not very suitable during paragliding with the camera mounted on your helmet for example. I had a couple of these tiny remote controlled cars, only 6cm long - a transmitter and receiver, so I modified these existing, cheap electronics to build my own remote. Here is the extensive article about the remote control with detailed instructions (but only in German ;) )