TU Delft Solar Boat Team Races to the Finish With The Help of a BeagleBone Black 'Brain'
Using a BeagleBone Black and a Skywire cape, a team from TU Delft successfully raced a solar-powered boat to victory.
The BeagleBoard Foundation's Cathy Wicks has written of a somewhat unusual project powered by the BeagleBone Black single-board computer: a crewed boat driven wholly by solar energy, developed by students at TU Delft.
"The maritime industry is facing many challenges utilising clean energy to become sustainable and a team of twenty-eight students is pooling their engineering skills to push the industry toward better solutions," Wicks writes of the project. "For ten years, the Solar Boat Team from the Delft University of Technology in Netherlands, has designed, produced, tested and raced a boat powered by solar energy. This past year, with the BeagleBone Black as 'the brain of the boat,' the team not only completed their most ambitious design; they won in the world championships."
The triple-hull design takes the energy for its motors from a 28 square metre solar panel deck, with a massed array of sensors linked to microcontrollers for everything from charge control to navigation. "The BeagleBone Black sits at the center of the electrical design, having knowledge of every subsystem in the form of CANbus data," Wicks explains.
"Utilising Data Acquisition Software, the sensor data is processed, interpreted and sent to both the pilot and strategy team during testing and races via an Antenna and Local Server which are connected to the BeagleBone Black. In addition, the Energy Management System software sends and receives CANbus messages, providing the team on the boat and on shore a clear picture if something goes wrong.
"When evaluating a solution," Wicks continues, "the students chose BeagleBone Black because they wanted a professional and reliable board that was easy to use. They soon discovered the power of the vast BeagleBoard.org community. Because BeagleBoard.org is an open source software and hardware community, finding a community-developed cape solution like the [NimbeLink] Skywire helped them decrease their development time."
More information on the BeagleBone Black's part in the project can be found on the BeagleBoard.org blog; the official TU Delft Solar Boat Team website has more on the project overall.