First on the water test

[johnm]

Finally did a real test of tinypilot.
Used opencpn 5.0.0 bionic packages on debian buster 64 bit.
pypilot plugin 0.5.0

Set gains to recommended initial settings.
Initially sort of worked, but gains clearly too low as it was OK being as much as 10 degrees off course.

Often mechanical wind vanes steer +- 10 degrees, so this may be considered acceptable if the sails are full and the power consumption minimal.

You can increase the gains to make it work harder to some extent, but eventually you will need a faster motor to get better performance.


You can also change servo.gain which is effectively an overall gain. It defaults to 1, so changing to 2 or 3 will get much more response.

This is with autohelm 3000 wheel drive.
Timed and it takes  23 sec for full swing which is probably  45 degrees each way.
The autohelm controller does pretty well even in moderately heavy seas  but I try to keep helm balanced.
I'll probably get a better drive at some point.

Do you recommend I raise the servo.gain  first?
Where is that setting?



Been going over the code and it's slowly making some sense to me.
Probably should read up on object oriented programming in python.

One thing I noticed is your using only gps speed.
Any possibility of adding option for water speed for those that have an instrument?
It should be better for predicting rudder response.