At first I thought of making my own boat from whatever materials were at hand. Maybe I even decided to make the boat first, and only later the duck chasing idea struck me. I don’t remember the details.
What I had:
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basic rc boat kit
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kid’s construction kit
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powerbank and batteries
What I’ve got:
To control the boat I’ve written a little web application. Raspberry hosted the application, I opened it in the phone’s browser, and controlled the boat by it. As I’ve only tested the boat at home, both the raspberry and the phone were connected to home wifi. Outdoors I’d need to enable wifi tethering on the phone and connect the boat to phones wifi.
What I’ve discovered is that either I’ve soldered the MotoZero poorly (I had little soldering experience before) or the motors in boat kit were too weak, but the propellers were barely rotating. That meant that I needed better motors. And anyway I needed a proper hull as I wouldn’t risk using such concoction in the wild lest the raspberry or batteris fall into the water or otherwise get wet. Long story short, I decided to just buy a boat and repurpose it for my needs.