SYSTEM FOR MEASURING SPEED OF RACING SAILBOAT

Abstract

Contemporary racing sailboats because of many years of technical progress in the construction of yachts and advancing knowledge of the crew in the theory of sailing, are equipped with a set of mechanisms to control the shape of sails, their mutual positioning and their positioning relative with the hull. Thanks to the large number of regulations that may have an effect on boat speed sailing upwind under certain wind conditions, selection of the optimal settings of sails becomes complicated and time-consuming. Thus, there exists a real need to use system that allow the measurement, archiving and presentations in real time the basic parameters of a moving sailboat. This would allow find a quick estimation of effectiveness of changes made to the sails settings. Currently commercially is lack of a relatively cheap solutions, which could be used to evaluate the nautical parameters of small yachts. The aim of the article is to present the system, which in future could meet these requirements. This system measures the speed of the sailboat using a GPS receiver, as well as wind speed and direction using a directional anemometer. The data collected through acquisition module based on microcontroller is sent via Bluetooth to the Android tablet that on the basis of receiving data allows to draw polar graphs of sailboat speed as a function of wind speed and direction. Hence, it becomes possible to find the optimal angle and the effective speed of the sailboat during sailing upwind. Moreover, software allows to check if yacht sails accordance to designated parameters thanks to the use of Petri nets. This solution significantly reduces the effort required to find the optimal sailboat settings.