Edgewood Sailing School: Telemetry Workshop

We had a great time running a DIY local radio telemetry workshop at the Edgewood Sailing School in Cranston, RI. The basic idea was to set up 'tilt' sensors on devices that would be placed on the sailboats; the sensors would relay their data to a laptop on the dock, which would display the current degree of tilt and GPS location of all of the youth boats currently out in the bay.

We were able to demonstrate basic functionality -- but real-life testing on the water helped us to figure out that our radio power settings were too low to achieve much range. We're excited to try the same experiment again next summer with an improved design!

Here are some pics from the workshop:

Getting set up for the telemetry workshop.

Discussing the plan for the day.

The boats go out!

Setting up the accelerometers at close radio range.

Debugging poor radio signals :)

More debugging ...

Still getting a signal ...

In the end, we discovered that a radio power setting was too low ... but we figured out how to increase the range for next time.

Wrapping up the workshop!

Click to watch a video demo of the tilt sensor in action!