I’m running an Adafruit Feather ESP32-S2 board with a custom PCB in the pendant with some tactile switches for the button press input, a 128×128 OLED display, and a single 18650 battery. There’s a pogo plug on the base that interfaces with the base station for recharging.
The base station has an Adafruit Metro ESP32-S2 board with an ultimate GPS shield and a custom board that has some relays, a digital potentiometer, trim pots, and some I/O breakouts for buttons. I’ll hook it directly up to a spare trolling motor foot pedal cable. The only modification that the trolling motor will get is to add a digital compass in the head of it. There will be another digital compass and GPS on the boat so that I can keep track of the difference between the boat and motor orientation.
Functionality will be a manual mode using PWM to maintain a desired speed and manual steering input, Path tracking mode will use PWM to maintain a desired heading and speed, and Spot Lock (station keeping) will keep the boat in position (a digital anchor).
They make trolling motors that do all of this, but they are spendy and I like to tinker.
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