Today was a beautiful day to test our wind sensor, Paul Larkin’s headsets, and our new GoPro Hero3 cameras. We also performed a brief kite test using the new 18 sqm kite. Paul’s friend John Bond joined us on this test.
First, we compared our primary wind sensor, an ultrasonic model, to a standard cup-and-vane sensor. In the past, we have seen suspicious readings in true wind speed and direction that we attributed to compass miscalibration or poor alignment of the sensor with the boat. In the last test, however, we collected data that showed that any compass or alignment errors that exist are far smaller than the discrepancies that we have seen. This data indicates that the basic apparent […more]
Today we performed a series of tests as part of our effort to improve our measurement of the kiteboat’s performance versus true wind angle (TWA), which is the angle between the wind direction and the heading of the boat. This information is ultimately used to produce polar plots, which are a standard method of showing the expected speed of a boat at different TWA. We are approaching this goal from several directions, which include adding a real-time update of the boat TWA to the boat mobile device displays and updating the KAIView software, as well as checking that the wind sensor readings are accurate. Today we towed K2 to calibrate the compass for this purpose. We additionally towed the boat […more]
Yesterday we took the Kitefoiler out to test it with a kite and three T-foils again. Additionally, we tested the newest hands-free radio prototype from Paul Larkin, who visited from InduComm to show us the system. The system fits inside one ear of a crew member and picks up voice through his or her jawbone, a setup which is meant to reduce wind noise. We taped the radios themselves to the outside of each person’s drysuit. There are one captain’s headset and several crew headsets. The radio has both push-to-talk and open-mic options. For our test, Paul wore the captain’s headset on the Protector, and Don, Joe, and Richard wore the crew headsets on the Kitefoiler. Paul attached a directional […more]
