The diary of FASt

May 25, 2008

Visit of the Austrian President

May 24, 2008

The first regattas FASt participated

After the start

With a light wind FASt rapidly went to the front of the fleet. Then it got lost with no wind...

The other competitors:

Roboat - the winner from INNOC, Austria

Pinta - from the University of Aberystwyth, UK, 2nd place

NorthStar from the University of Queens, Canada, 3rd place

May 21, 2008

Finally the first tests in the lake Neusiedlersee

May 20, 008

"Debug" of software in the Yacht Clube de Breitenbrunn

Arriving to the marina.

May 18, 2008

Marina of Breitenbrunn.

The flags of participating countries

Testing water leaks

May 18, 2008

Last details... Our house transformed into a shipyard!

Soldering in the kitchen with the help of the coffee machine.

May 17, 2008

Arriving to Breitenbrunn for the 1st World Championship of Robotic Sailing, after 32h non-stop driving  and 3000km.

May 9, 2008

First "test" on the grass with sails

April 26, 2008

Assembling the mast, keel and bulb

April 20, 2008

Attachement of the main hatches

April 16, 2008

The first tests with the solar panel, battery chager and power supply

April 15, 2008

Some details of he interior of the hull

April 14, 2008

Gluing the deck to the hull

April 13, 2008

The bulb: 20Kg of sheets of lead glued together with epoxy

March 20, 2008

The backstay will fix to two pieces of stainless steel attached to the stern panel. The same bolts also fix two 'U' shaped pieces in carbon fiber that will be later used to install additional hardware at the stern.

March 19, 2008

The main PCB board. This will host the main computer, GPS, the two AD converters and all the peripheral circuits external to the Suzaku board (logic level adapters, buffers, status LEDs and edge connectors). The board is approximately 20 x 12 cm.

March 19, 2008

Building a custom aluminum adapter with a CNC milling machine. This will connect the sail motor shaft to the motor's gear wheel with a rubber cardan joint.

Building the adapter

The complete cardan joint

March 17, 2008

More reinforcements: a core of rigid polyurethane foam covered by two layers of carbon fiber with epoxy. In a future boat, these reinforcements may be done directly during the construction of the hull.

March 5, 2008

The central platform will support the main electronic board and the other modules (GPS, compass, etc). The watertight bulkhead (white) separates the stern compartment from the rest of the hull, to prevent any leak of the rudder's shafts of getting into the electronic boards.

March 1, 2008

The electric motors to control the sail will be mounted in the front compartment. The motor shaft is brought to the deck through aluminum bushings that house the ball bearings and a watertight seal. A stainless steel piece to fix the forestay was mounted in the bow and reinforced with a few layers of carbon fiber.

The DC motor with the shaft attached.

Interior view of the bow, showing the reinforcement in the bow with carbon fiber

The deck

February 18, 2008

Internal reinforcements in plywood to support the foot of the mast.

February 18, 2008

The prototype of the deck. The round overture will give access to the stern compartment where the servo motors and the rudder mechanism will be mounted.

The solar panel (Solara SM160M)

February 15, 2008

The first photograh of the boat with the rudders and the keel.

February 15, 2008

Opening the overture in the bottom of the hull for the keel.

February 15, 2008

The keel box and the two main bulkheads

February 8, 2008

The keel box was glued to the hull with epoxy and several reinforcements of carbon fiber and Kevlar-carbon fabric. This region of the hull was built without the honey-comb core.

January 28, 2008

The interior of the mast was inspected with a miniature video camera, to check the position of the rivets that fix the rail.  With the help of a small plastic tube attached to the camera,  drops of thickened epoxy were deposited in the inner part of the rivets in order to guarantee the stanching of the mast.

Our "high-tech" endoscope

Operating the "endoscope"

Filling the tube with epoxy

The inner end of one rivet...

...and after a drop of epoxy

January 26, 2008

The keel box is concluded. The three holes in the top will be used to fix the keel.

January 26, 2008

The front platform where the DC motors, batteries and power modules will be installed.

Small bulkheads were cut from the same material used for the deck and glued to a Plexiglas sheet with a set of screws attached to each bulkhead. The assembly was then glued to the bottom of the hull.

January 26, 2008

The two rudders in their final position.

The "nose" was made with polyurethane rubber and is fixed to the hull with three bolts and Sikaflex

January 20, 2008

The keel will be movable to facilitate transportation. Similarly to dinghies, the keel is installed in a keel box, going from the bottom of the hull to the deck. The keel box was built in two halves, using the keel as a mould. The two parts will be later glued together, after fairing the internal surface to allow the keel to slip easily with a minimum slack.

The assembly for building one half of the keel box.

First layers of fiberglass and polyester resin

An essential tool to squeeze the fiber and remove the air bubbles: a roll made up with a stack of washers.

The two halves of the keel box in the approximate final position.

December 7, 2007

The two rudders are controlled by two independent servomotors (Hitec HS-805BB, 27Kg.cm), connected to the rudders shafts with gear wheels. Using two servos we will be able to vary the angle between the rudders and even switch one servo off if the the boat is sufficiently heeled that the windward rudder is kept out of the water.

November 29,2007

The rudders will be mounted in a bulkhead with bushings made of Teflon in a stainless steel tube.

The support for the rudders and servos.

Making the openings in the hull for the rudders.

November 24, 2007

The mast was built with stiff tubes of carbon fiber used in competition paddles. The rail has been recovered from an old mast and fixed to the tube with rivets and Sikaflex.

November 15, 2007

The core of polyurethane rigid foam was first covered with fiberglass, faired and then laminated in vacuum with various layers of carbon fiber. The final keel is 1.5m long and weighs approximately 3Kg. The PVC tube runs the keel from top to bottom and may be useful to place a sensor in the bottom of the keel.

A cut of the keel showing the inner core of foam and wood and the outer layer of carbon.

Testing...

After being laminating in vacuum.

Covering the inner core with fiberglass

October 8, 2007

The keel was built starting from a inner core of rigid polyurethane foam, shaped to a NACA0010 profile. The core was made in two halves, each one shaped using a custom tool: a piece of wood cut to the desired profile and covered with sandpaper.

October 3, 2007

Finally, the hull was removed from the mould!

The dark region in the bottom does not have the honeycomb core and is the place where the keel box will be attached.

September 29, 2007

After 3 month of interruption, the boat was finally built. The mould was first painted with gelcoat. Then, the sandwich of carbon fiber (outer layer), honeycomb core and fiberglass (inner layer) was placed in the mould. A final layer of a porous fabric was laid over the sandwich, to let the air circulate and absorb the excess of resin. Finally, a sheet of plastic was glued to the mould edges and the vacuum tubes attached to it to extract the air and press the sandwich against the hull.

A detail of the sandwich materials.

Laying out  the sandwich layers

June 6, 2007

With the rest of the model recovered we did the first test on the water, just to see the boat floating.

May 25, 2007

As the polyester resin contracts when it cures, the model was "compressed" inside the mould. To remove it, we had to break all the frames reducing the model only to the layer of wood stripes and almost destroying the work of 3 months...

May 24, 2007

The fiberglass mould was reinforced with a steel frame glued to the fiberglass.

The mould

May 12, 2007

After several iterations of filling and sanding, the model was painted with a hard polyurethane primer and polished to achieve a shiny surface.

April 27, 2007

Fairing the model. Algorithm is:

while ( ! surface_smooth ){

  fill_the_"valleys"_with_polyester_mastic;

  remove_the_"hills"_with_sandpaper;

  surface_smooth = complex_eye_function();

}

In the middle of the process...

After the first coating of filler, a sheet of fiberglass was laid on the model to help fix the wood stripes.

The first coating of mastic

April 19, 2007

The first trip of FASt: from FEUP to the Elio Kayaks factory.

Arriving to Elio Kayaks

Exiting FEUP

April 17, 2007

The nose was shaped from a block of plywood and glued to the front panel of the model.

The nose in place.

Checking the alignment between the nose and the hull.

April 17, 2007

After strip planking the hull, a first layer of polyester mastic has filled the spaces between the wood stripes. Then it was sanded to remove the excess of filler and wood.

April 4, 2007

The hull was covered with stripes of pine wood (20x6mm) glued to the frames. We used thermo glue to fix the stripes and screws at the ends of the most difficult (bended) stripes. This glue has proved to be an efficient adhesive for this job, requiring no more than 30 seconds to cool down and fix the pieces together.

The stripes of the front section were made of a different wood, much more flexible than pine. Because these stripes were only 4mm thick, we need to glue a thin 2mm layer of wood to the front frames.

Lots of hands were necessary to keep the stripes in position!

March, 23 2007

The frames were joined to the base table with thermo glue deposited only in the edges of contact. It proved to be enough to keep the frames in place and eases the process of alignment.

Because the frames have a significant thickness (8mm), we had to place the frames at the correct distance from the stern, according to the frame's edge that will define the correct form of the hull: from the stern to the maximum width of the hull, it is the back edge of the frame that must placed at that section coordinate; from the middle hull to the bow it is the front edge of each frame that defines the hull shape.

In this frame, it is the bottom part (in the picture) than defines the correct profile of the hull.

All frames in place

Adding more frames... To guarantee the correct distance between the frames, small pieces of wood were glued between them.

The first frames.

February 28, 2007

Launching the first stone!

We start by building a solid flat table  where the frames will be attached. The frames were cut from 8mm plywood in a furniture factory, using a CNC cutter. The input to the CNC were the drawings of the sections exported from FreeShip, modified to include a set of guide marks to facilitate the alignment.

The final drawings used to cut out the frames.

The central guide.

Verifying the alignment of the the guide with a laser beam.

The frame to support the base platform.