OKE Precision Winch "Reel and Rotate" Technology

Windy_Skies · August 25, 2024, 11:19am

August 24 2024: https://www.reddit.com/r/AerospaceEngineering/comments/1f0h9p6/i_invented_a_winch_to_control_kites_eventually/

August 24 2024: https://www.reddit.com/r/boating/comments/1f0ii4q/i_invented_a_winch_to_convert_boats_into/

January 29 2024: https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/1adupcm/ive_been_secretly_3d_printing_this_bot_that/

IOT devices that will be placed at longer ranges (up to 4km with line of sight) use LoRa

Or:

ZigBee/RF4CE: 100 m

Bluetooth low energy: 100 m

2.4 GHz Wi-Fi: 150 m

Bluetooth low energy using Bluetooth 5 extended range capability: 200 to 400 m

Here’s a LoRa transciever: Adafruit RFM95W LoRa Radio Transceiver Breakout - 868 or 915 MHz [RadioFruit] : ID 3072 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits

I couldn’t find much information about power usage, so that could be a sticking point .

[–]vimau

Size, Weight and Power usage of these devices is minimal. A small wind powered generator would probably be the heaviest part but even that shouldn’t weigh much.

Making a device that’s capable of surviving a ‘landing’ would probably the the more difficult problem to solve.

edit - a battery weighing a couple of ounces (< 100g) would power a device like this for days. Provided continuous operation isn’t required it could be made with no moving parts, allowing for a robust and watertight device.

It’s used for home automation primarily, but the OG use for MQTT was oil companies needing low power long range devices to collect telemetry on oil pipelines.

This is an excellent primer on MQTT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTeJxQFD8Ak&list=PLRkdoPznE1EMXLW6XoYLGd4uUaB6wB0wd

The thinking is you put your sensor package into a kit with some solar panels and batteries so you can drop it on a pipeline in the middle of the wilderness and it constantly transmits telemetry over a packet radio transceiver. There is a hub that is receiving all of the telemetry and distributing the data to all of the subscribers.

So, in this case you’d have accelerometers, anemometers, or you can even get mm-wave radar range finders (which may or may not work on the water’s surface YMMV) all attached to something like a Raspberry Pi. The Pi would transmit the telemetry via MQTT over a LoRa WAN to a base unit running the MQTT broker software and then any applications that you would be running locally (like the control software) could receive a stream of real time telemetry updates from the onboard sensors. The MQTT broker is just a service that you run, but it can be (in giant deployments) its own device if required.

Here’s an example of someone setting up MQTT to transmit over LORA, they’re sending different data but the process would be the same but you’d be reading from different sensors: Connecting long range sensors using LoRa and MQTT - Share your Projects! - Home Assistant Community

Depending on the expected flight time you can probably run it on batteries for quite some time. The battery weight should be trivial compared to the amount of lift the kite is generating… so even if you needed a few kg of batteries it shouldn’t (? I’m no kite engineer) affect the kite handing too much. Alternatively, you could run cable up the control lines to carry power and data, though the total weight for something like this could become a factor… but you wouldn’t have to worry about issues with wireless causing you to lose telemetry if it becomes a critical part of the control system.

All of the components in the Arduino ecosystem are built from the ground up so there isn’t a lot of excess components to add weight. Batteries would be most of the mass, the sensors and compute are very light.

[–]photoshopbot_01

Yeah, it could be built under 100g easily. I make small hobby remote control fighting robots (with a weight limit of 150g including all the motors, wheels etc) and I experimented with adding an mpu6050 to my setup. stick it in a mini tupperware or other hard sealable case, and maybe something printed in tpu on the outside for a bit of shock absorbsion and you should be able to throw it at a brick wall as hard as you like without breaking it. I use an arduino with integrated NRF24L01 (called an rf-nano) but it’s only super reliable for 10-20 metres or so. For your application I think I would try something intended for longer range stuff like LoRa.