GPS

Have you seen this site Random Tech Stuff: Experiments with the RFM69 433MHz digital transceiver module it uses a custom chip but does have some of what are looking for.

The arduino is not enough processing to control and store much information on its own. You will need a an sd card attachment to save where you went and use for retracing the route. Another way would be using a raspberry pi having this and more.

Clem

An arduino could do it but with limited ram etc, it may be reduced to a very basic set of way points and not tracking intermediate spots. going home would be a case of either reversing the ay point order or simple line of sight back to the starting point. correction etc on the way would be a simple matter of speed, current location and calculating the correction.

This would take some cleaver programming and possibly in raw C or even assembly rather than wiring in order to get better memory usage and speed, or using an arduino MEGA2560 solving the RAM and flash issue. the overhead of having an SD card on an Arduino UNO would outway its benifits in this situation as the drivers and required bufferes will consume a significant part of the available flash and Ram

A PI would work, just with more power consumption. It may be worth looking at a Arm Cortex Mx board as an option like the SAML21 from atmel

The guys at Wyolum did a special board.

https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1wtgUoS4d7RWNOscLEQqgQcdmxl_rW34bLy4mNCantpQ

I happen to know where a few are ....

Mark

Really? PM me if you can get one please. Thanks.

Clem

Thats exactly what I am doing with a quadcopter.

It uses most of the Arduinos power to read and write PWM signals for a servo, assuming you also want to be able to manually control it.  2 arduinos would be suffice.  I am using an Raspberry Pi 2 for my project.

Click here quadcop_project

An rc boat is only a 2 channel item (throttle and steering) and then you need a manual override switch, so 3 channels min.  So 1 arduino might be enough if coded properly, mine is using 7 channels so its a bit much for it on top of GPS.  The GPS I am using is Serial based and called the Microstack GPS.

There are many arduino variants out there, the chipkit, and the new Zero.  All of these would be more than enough power.

There are already libraries written for arduino (AVR) only called ArduPilot.  Google for it, its all AVR code.  It can control an RC car which is not different from a boat in terms of what is needed.

You will need the older release 2.8.1 as they have moved on to a new MCU.

https://github.com/diydrones/ardupilot/tree/ArduCopter-2.8.1

I've looked into the code before but its too much to understand so I am writing mine from scratch.

Did this go anywhere?BOB NELSON