Técnico Solar Boat – Electronics behind the boat

Técnico Solar Boat team believes that by designing and implementing the majority of electronic components in-house it is possible to extract maximum performance from our competition prototypes while learning the most.

From the boat’s throttle to the Cooling Control Unit (temperature monitoring and pump control) all PCBs are designed to suit all our different needs.

This season we counted with the precious help of Eurocircuits in the manufacturing process of the PCBs required to improve our current solar prototype SR03.

The fast delivery times and very high-quality PCBs were crucial to the fulfilment of our tight deadlines. In addition to that the Virtual Manufacturing Tool helped to minimise the number of iterations needed to get our electronics working.

Back foil actuator

The back hydrofoil actuation method has had multiple iterations, from hydraulic systems to electronic ones since the beginning of our foiling journey in 2020. In our most recent vessel SR03 we chose to use the P16 linear actuator from Actuonix together with a lever system made in-house.

To control with the required precision the position of this linear servo there was a need to develop a new PCB, capable of receiving CAN messages (communication protocol used in the boat) from our flight controller and using a variable voltage output to actuate the servo.

We are currently testing the active control of our hydrofoils to be ready to fly in Monaco’s Energy Boat Challenge this year in July, so stay tuned!

Custom throttle

Our electronics department decided to implement a custom programmable throttle that could send and receive CAN messages. To do that we designed a PCB to go with a magnetic rotary encoder (AS5045) so we could sense the exact position of the handle and calculate the desired speed.

Without the help of Eurocircuits none of this would be possible. Thank you very much for all the support and incredible service delivery, our PCBs look amazing!