First, Seattle Mini Maker Faire is this coming weekend at EMP (Sep 17/18). We'll be showing off the Hackerboat outside near the monorail -- please come by and take a look at the boat in person!

Second, we created a Patreon account to help raise money for the boat. Please donate!

I finally got a chance to assemble the power distribution control board assembled. I haven't mounted the switches, since I am going to solder them to fit once the whole thing is mounted in the dry box. Here's a picture of the two boards together:

The distribution board manages the question of whether the boat is armed or disarmed with a latching relay, which is the orange bit on the left of the image. Most of the rest of the circuitry on the board is a pair of timer circuits to debounce the emergency stop button and to require the operator to hold down the arm button for a substantial amount of time before the boat is armed. This board also cuts the motor power as soon as the emergency stop button is engaged, which should make things a bit safer.

The software is coming along -- have a look at our Github for the latest progress. It's mostly a slog at this point, but the end is in sight, at least for the main code. I still need to write proper unit and functional tests so we can assure ourselves that it a) works and b) we can change up the code as necessary in the future. In other words, all the benefits of having solid unit and integration tests.

We'll probably do another launch the weekend after Makerfaire to test the RC and compass subsystems, as well as gather some more video for a proper Patreon video.