Meet Kayaktopus
It
didn't take long to realize, looking at the desired feature list of my
new kayak, that it was going to require a bit more than a few
off-the-shelf gadgets. There are dozens of tasks, each rather
simple but collectively quite powerful, that require a real-time
multitasking operating system and a fair bit of I/O hardware.
This page and its decendants track the development of the Kayaktopus project.
©
2007 by
Steven K. Roberts
Nomadic Research
Labs
last updated: Apr 24, 2007
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The Rationale
At first glance, this may sound just a bit excessive... after all, I'm the guy who built the BEHEMOTH bicycle, an existence proof of the Roberts Law of Applied Mobile Gizmology:
"If you take an infinite number of very light things and put them
together, they become infinitely heavy." I have occasionally been
accused, with some justification, of over-engineering.
My recent transition from the mighty Bubba to a kayak small enough to stow on the nets of my trimaran casts this perverse tendency into sharp perspective. Bubba (an Aire Sea Tiger inflatable) had a 700-pound load capacity. My new Hobie Revolution (named Number Nine),
is rated at exactly half that figure... and an embarrassingly large
percentage of the weight budget is already taken up by my own
bulk. This rules out luxury kayak-camping of the sort I did with
the previous boat, but that's OK: the whole mission profile has
changed. With Nomadness as the mothership, the new kayak is intended for local exploration and gunkholing thin water.
What this means is just that there is a weight limitation that
externally imposes discipline when it comes to superfluity. That
still leaves the basic question unanswered: why stuff a bunch of
delicate gizmology into a kayak, beyond the essential (and common)
tools for navigation, communication, photography, sonar, and
safety? What could be worth even 25 extra pounds in something
that has to be manually schlepped about with every use, especially when
it has to be packaged well enough to survive the corrosive salt-water
environment?
Well. Imagine a kayak security system that recognizes my
presence, otherwise responding by speaking local warnings and calling
me on the radio if hatches are opened or the kayak is moved.
Further imagine that the boat has a suite of sensors that can report on
a wide range of conditions, triggering alarms in extreme cases (water
in bilge or dying battery) while collecting data for live telemetry and
later analysis. If afloat without me (not necessarily a theft
scenario; it might be swept off the boat in a storm or drift off the
beach on a rising tide if I'm careless, which has happened), it could beacon its location to appear on the findu.com
server as well as transmit position data to the mothership. Given
the ability to handle audio, we can add recording from voice
annotation and a hydrophone... and it's a small leap from that to doing
video as well (underwater, bow, and console cameras). Heck, it's
but another small step to allow remote queries by either DTMF over ham
radio (UHF auxiliary operation with synthesized speech response), data interactions via packet, or a web
server front end via a wireless bridge. Suddenly the kayak
becomes a tool for situation awareness... not just a magic carpet, but
an extension of human senses.
When two or more people are kayaking together, it is common to get
separated enough that it's hard for the person behind to ask the person
in front to "slow down so I can catch up, damn it!" This is
trivial to solve with cheap VHF radios, of course, but let's scale it
further: a flotilla of kayakers with varying abilities, scattered
across a foggy channel and affected in different ways by wind and
current. With a little "black box" on each boat, every paddler
would have a little scrolling list of the range and bearing to all the
others - each tagged with a brief annotation about the person's
condition as well as any system-level data that might be
interesting. A bona fide emergency could even start flashing LED
navlights and horn in an SOS pattern.
I often think of my kayak as a probe, allowing me to stealthily explore
"up close and personal" in places where normal boats (even shoal-draft
trimarans) would be unable to go. This becomes a lot more fun
when said probe is equipped with a variety of ways to observe and
record water quality, weather, radiation, proximity to RF sources,
physical motion, underwater sound, depth, precise location, and the
antics of critters obscured by darkness or murk. Naturally, this
takes kayak fishing to a whole new level.
The Hobie Mirage Revolution, with pedal, sail, and paddle power. There is not a lot of space for gizmology.
The Project
You may be wondering about the "Kayaktopus" name; I guess it is a bit of a mouthful. This is the son of Shacktopus, an all-in-one suite of geek toys in a
backpack-scale package that I was developing in 2005 (architecture drawing). That project was moving
along briskly (even going public with
a Sea-Pac booth, a hearty Slashdotting, and a
feature in Make Magazine issue 06), but it abruptly
paused when my father passed away and I spent 6
months shutting down the old homestead in
Kentucky. Then came the quest and acquisition of
Nomadness,
the maiden voyage, a major relationship change...
and here we are, fast-forwarded all the way to
2007, with the Shacktopus box still in the
same spot on a lab bench and a lot of very cool components still in their anti-static bags.
Enter Kayaktopus. It's the same basic idea, minus the HF radio and Linux board. I'm designing this with
the intent of using the identical hardware and
code base in a full scale Shacktopus
implementation in the trimaran... in the meantime building this scaled
down version for infrastructure development. Hardware is
arriving, the code looks pretty straightforward in the SAM7X
multitasking environment (the Make Controller),
and the initial design goals are modest enough to be realistic for a
well-defined project of finite (and weight-constrained) scale.
The controller (pictured at the top of this page) comes with a decent RTOS, an application board with lots of useful
I/O including servo drivers and CAN bus, and it speaks OSC for easy
fiddling from a connected host. The previous system was wrapped around
an ATmega128, but I have chosen this one for its apparent ease of
development with the included tasker.
It is conceivable, though by no means a sure thing, that in addition
to publishing much of the design, I'll be willing to clone this for
people. After I get the first one going and play with it a bit,
I'll have a much better idea if it makes sense to do so. If you
want one, please stay in touch.
This page will reflect the approximate state of the project as it
develops, and it will probably be discussed occasionally on the Nomadness Blog.
Packaging
Installation in the Hobie Mirage Revolution
doesn't leave much room for sloppiness, and since I want it built in, I
can't even stuff it all into a generous Pelican box lashed to the deck
as I did with Bubba. The current design consists of three gasketed clear polycarbonate enclosures:
- System (in the large forward hatch): The Make Controller board, wireless ethernet bridge, speech synthesizer, SD card
datalogger, audio/video switcher, DTMF decoder, speaker driver, and
sensor interfaces, OpenTracker2 APRS board, Lassen iQ GPS receiver, stripped-down
2-meter 5-watt rig just for APRS, VX-2R radio for handshaking with the
VX-6R in my pack, and VHF/UHF antenna duplexer for sharing the
dual-band J-pole mounted on the solar frame.
- Power (under the solar frame behind the seat): 95 watt-hour Li-Ion smart battery, SMBUS charger
from solar or wall-wart input, circuit breakers.
- User Interface (in the round hatch under my legs): a 4x20 LCD with
associated buttons for simple user interface, RFID reader for
Steve-detection, and row of manual
switches for basic DC loads around the boat.
As packaging proceeds, this might change a bit, though I am trying to minimize cabling (expensive and relatively vulnerable).