Bobby the safety boat

We were approached by the local station of the Royal Canadian Marine Search and Rescue Society at the 2016 "Kids Conference" to see if we could help extend the battery life of their little "boat".

Well we replaced a whole bunch of incandescent bulbs with LEDs and brought the battery drain down substantially.

The "boat" that is in the space now is their backup and we have further plans for it:

• make the same kind of bulb changes;
• replace the R/C elements (transmitter, receiver and more importantly and harder, the decoding functions);
• facilitate the RCM-SAR's plans to paint it with fresh paint;
• it needs a new bow microphone;
• it was thought that the motors could be upgraded, but investigations led us to believe that that would be too much work for little gain. The motors which are installed are geared down internally and still are in really good shape. I'd still like to get a really good idea of what power the motors draw and have been working on a power monitoring/acquisition system to do that.