Overview - When and Why I did this...

Several years ago I started dreaming of what I now call a cruise control to steer the kicker (trolling motor, a small outboard) on my boat. I enjoy salt water sport fishing in southeast Alaska and I wanted a 'hands free' way to keep my boat on heading while I was getting lines in the water, baiting up or just goofing off.

My boat was an old flat bottom jet with lots of canvas and in even the slightest breeze it needed constant attention to the helm or it just went in circles. Like many jets it didn't have a way to steer the kicker remotely, so I had to sit on the transom to steer - I couldn't even get under all that canvas to keep out of the rain!

Obviously my first priority was to find some way to steer the kicker from inside. I found several choices:

Steering links (like EZ Steer) are widely used in southeast Alaska to allow outboard or I/O main-power steering to control a kicker, but most don't work with inboard or jet main-power. I only found one steering link for jets, but it didn't support my jet and outboard, the kit was pretty expensive, and it required professional installation (at least it looked beyond what I wanted to do myself).

The Electro-Steer and Remote-Troll are systems to electrically control a kicker with a wired remote control. The Electro-Steer looked particularly easy to install and was about half the price of the Remote-Troll.

And of course I saw the autopilots (like the TR-1) but my whole boat didn't cost the price of one of those things - and besides I didn't really need all the bells and whistles (like throttle control, steering when the outboard is in reverse, etc). All I wanted was helm control.

I bought an Electro-Steer and easily installed it (in ~ 2 hours). Ah - fishing in the rain and staying dry! Despite some reliability issues I was (and am) pretty happy with that choice.

Maybe it was just buyer's remorse for not going for the TR-1, but as I was now staying dry I had more comfortable time between fish to ponder my original 'hands free' goal. True I wasn't wet, true I could move around the boat as I wanted, but I still couldn't start something that was gonna need both hands for more than 30-40 seconds (as I mentioned before, my boat really hates going in a straight line).

I started thinking about hooking the Electro-Steer to an old laptop but before I got too far down that road inspiration came to me from a slightly different direction. One afternoon surfing the web I came across the Pond Explorer. As soon as I saw it I knew I was gonna have a robo-boat!

Wish I could say I went out and built a great working 'hands free' controller right then and there, but my path was less direct☻ Very early on I decided I was not going to be cutting wires or otherwise molesting the Electro-Steer. My first idea was a direct interface like this

so the controller could be quickly unplugged and the original Electro-Steer configuration restored for problem resolution. But after weeks of talking to Marine Tech, searching local stores, and searching the internet I was unable to find connectors for the above yellow and green plugs that matched the Electro-Steer plugs.

Being so blocked from this direct interface approach led me to a design for a strange contraption that used servos to push the buttons on the wired controller; something that should be possible but that I am not enough of a craftsman to build properly. I spun my wheels on this effort for several months and as spring approached I even built a prototype just to have something running for the fishing season. Thankfully I never had to boat test that mess.

My breakthrough came one spring day in an hardware store when I saw this

 
CALTERM 08003

and realized it was the missing link I had been looking for that would let me implement the direct interface - that is - I could cut the 1 ft '8003' cable in half and have a 6 inch yellow connector and a 6 inch green connector for the above diagram.

Since I had already been preparing an alternate design to put on the boat it only took me another week or two to adapt that to the direct interface. When I hooked it all up - it worked! Sorta. I messed with the controlling software most of the rest of the season and by fall, using a PID approach, I had a machine that really would let me run 'hands free' for extended periods.

In the years since I've refined it in a number of ways. At this point it works well, is something I think others would like to have on their boats, and is pretty easy and inexpensive to build using off the shelf high level components. 'Hands free helm control' seems a bit clumsy, so I now call it a 'cruise control'.

Update:

I've talked with a couple of people about MinnKota's lately. I didn't notice these when I was casting about for a cruise control solution, and I've never actually seen one - guess they are not popular in southeast Alaska. I'm told to get their autopilot feature you have to buy the bow mount version, which costs about $1,000. At that rate it's less than half the price of the TR-1, but nearly twice the price of PowerTroll (including a wireless remote and an Electro-Steer).

Even thou it appears to be an electric outboard I'm told it is used in addition to your regular outboard, not as a replacement, so you end up controlling two outboards(?). I don't know how large a boat it can control. It's being a commercial product with warrantee and service might be worth the price difference, but it also takes up room on the front of your boat and the bow might be a difficult place to try to operate another motor on some boats (it would be a real pain on mine).

Another update (probably the last)

I've sold the boat I developed this for so this is a 'mature' project - meaning I'm no longer doing much of anything with it.