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FishPi: Raspberry Pi Powered Autonomous Boat To Cross the Ocean
lukehopewell1 writes "The Raspberry Pi is a triumph in computing, and it's now set to become a triumph in robotics as one developer plans to build a model boat around it and sail it across the Atlantic Ocean, completely unmanned. It's codenamed FishPi and will see a model boat sail across the Atlantic all by itself save for a camera, GPS module, compass and solar panels."
The creator is posting updates on the build progress using a forum on his website.
"BitCoin"..."Raspberry Pi"...Bingo!
I would have made a tiny robotic pumpkin carriage and called it a Pumpkin Pi. But that's just me.
Shouldn't this be an article of after they built it and it about to leave on it's trip? I could say hey I'm creating a rocket launch system and rocket guidance system using Raspberry Pi that will take my hamster not only into near earth orbit but also using GPS and compass gliding back to earth to my backyard all caught on it's internal camera. Oh and it's all solar powered. Call it RocketPi. Come on.... Anyone can start building anything wait for it ready to be tested before everyone goes ape over it.
Make it an underwater glider and give homeland security another panic attack.
Ah yes, the weekly Raspberry Pi post.
One post a week is really that bad?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Breaking news: Somali pirates are now in the Atlantic. And now we go to Steve for the weather.
Build something from other various products. How is hobby building anything more than consumerism?
Other than they both involved buying stuff, in just about every possible way. For one thing, hobby building usually requires thinking, innovation, and creativity, as well as re-use and a ton of other stuff consumerism finds absolutely abhorrent.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
So you make it a little bigger. Better yet get rid of the hull. Just press your drugs into a boat like shape, seal that in plastic and install the hardware to turn it into a DrugFishPi.
I am not sure how you would know which modem is a drug one or not. The only data the drugfishpi needs to send is final location.
Drug runner are much better of using onboard human brain power getting updates over FM radio.
The premise is that if you use robots you can spam them. Drugs are cheap where they are produced, some of them amazingly so. People are cheap too, but getting them to where you want them isn't necessarily. If you can build lots of small smuggling drones with toy technology and then spam your target with them, and have them receive-only until they are near their destination, there's no reason why they should be easily detected. The same is true, of course, of fleets of autonomous bombs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I would do the same, but make two, and call it pumpkin Tau!
Oh... wait... what? That's not where you were heading?
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
The closed-source bootloader is actually only licensed for use on the Raspberry Pi and it runs on the totally undocumented VideoCore hardware, so even if somehow you did manage to get hold of the components you couldn't legally build your own. I suspect it might also require a custom ROM bootloader that's only on the chips supplied to Raspberry Pi too or something.