Jtim3032

@skierjp Actually our first prototype test was on a 2001 Nautique. We intend it to be a relatively easy retrofit.

@Horton excellent! I look forward to meeting you...

@Martin1980 I am not sure what the other company are called but they were certainly working on autosteer late last year, as are we now. We have tested a hardware prototype and hope to be testing with elite skiers April/May. That said, I would not expect it to be ratified for use in tournament this summer.

I will be at Swiss in Clermont, but can travel elsewhere if required.

If anyone wants to see the Sure-Path boat lane tracking system in action, I will be in the US over the next couple of weeks and am happy to answer questions etc. 4th-7th March, Fort Myers area; 8th-11th March Orlando area; 12th-15th March Sacramento area.

@Horton Yes that would certainly work if the base was centrally located. It is not uncommon for the farming community to share a base station between a group of adjacent farms. Although this technology is new to the water skiing community, it has been used by farming and construction for at least 20 years. It is only now that the costs have come right down that it has become affordable for the little guys to get involved.

@RAWSki We are just about ready to take first orders. The system is not yet ratified for tournament use (work on that is in progress) but is fine for homologation and driver training etc. The introductory price in the US is $2000.00 plus some shipping. Updates over the next year or so will of course be free.

The ideal is to pre-program a flight path and height for the drone and trigger it as the skier approaches the course. Sometimes dangerous though as the height sensors on drones often get confused over water!

With a bit of practice (and some courage flying low over water with an expensive bit of kit :D ), it can be done. I am sure I could get a lot closer to the skier with some more practice. https://dropbox.com/s/kledsbzfi1x7zf1/DJI_0014.MOV?dl=0 And here is another one where maybe I got closer than intended! ... https://dropbox.com/s/1rss2of82bvh5bb/Rachel%20-%20June%202018.mp4?dl=0

@Horton Yes, depending on what telemetry is used, any number of rovers can receive their error data from a single base, so for instance, head to heads could be run literally side by side with rovers in both boats and a single base.

"Next step is this GPS steers the boat in the course. We’ve got self driving cars already, soon we have self driving ski boats. My 2 cents..." We are already working on it ;)

@skiinxs We have found that a 3G/4G link is far and away the most reliable way to link Base & Rover, plus the fact that there is no risk of interference with the already crowded RF needed for video links. However, as you say there are sites where there is no cell coverage and in those circumstances, a conventional radio modem link can be used.

@MISkier Yes it should have shown at every buoy but the text was too wide and "wrapped" to a second line thus becoming invisible. Now fixed. With regard to general visibility, at the end of a pass, the boat graphic goes away and the user can scroll back through the pass and see where the breadcrumb trail was at any point in the pass.

@MISkier The deviation at each set of boat lane buoys is the figure in the middle of the horizontal black bars (only visible as it appears below the boat graphic). The figure in brackets next to it is the cumulative. The figures to the right are the timings at each set of buoys although there was a bug in this version of the software and the timings are not accurate. This has now been fixed and timings seem to be mostly the same or within 1/100th of a second to Zero-Off. We will be putting up an updated version of the video in due course. @aupatking Yes, it is inevitable that things will progress towards using the deviation data to control steering in some way. Whilst that may seem scary at first, software can be made to be as skier friendly as the powers that be will permit, eg current speed control systems :)

@Gloersen. Although the system could use a local radio modem as a link between base and rover (which could suffer from obstructions such as trees etc) we have found that using 3G/4G via an online server far more reliable. In addition, powerful radio modems can interfere with other transmitting devices such as are used for boat video in tournament.