Another day, another boat crashing into my dock... sigh

mattp

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What about setting up a spray system. If they hit your dock, they get sprayed with water.
If the customers start getting wet because of the idiot boat "captains" hitting your dock, it'll stop pretty quick.
 

Parley

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The thing is its theoretically a no wake zone and theres plenty of room for two large pontoons to pass each other. Its like 25-30ft wide.

The big tour boats just dont pay attention, the little gator snack tour boats have no clue, and the "private" tours like the asshole in the pontoon are just out to make a quick buck from the tourists. $35 per person
I think this time it was the little yellow boat with the boy and girl in it that was causing the trouble. They were on the wrong side of passage way and two boats hit them with the large boat being one of them. .
 

tangent

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Here are a few devices you could use to sense impacts (likely need to be in a NEMA enclosure):

NCD USB Gateway Industrial IoT Wireless to USB Modem - NCD Store


Monit gateway: Ethernet Gateway For Wireless Sensor Communication

$75 (has wifi and BLE and SD card to log data):

$17 Extensive programming and some soldering required (could be quite a challenge, has BLE):
SparkFun Edge Development Board - Apollo3 Blue - DEV-15170 - SparkFun Electronics
 
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wittaj

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@bigredfish, Living there, seeing that happen at times would stress me out to the point I would do something I would regret the next day!
But apart from that, what a lovely dock area you have there.... Jealous
At the frequency it is getting hit, it will be more like "what a lovely dock area you HAD there"
 

tangent

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Of the devices I linked above, the SparkFun DataLogger IoT 9DoF would be the simplest for your use case and cheapest of the ready to use devices I found.

It has a built in accelerometer, gyro, and magnetometer as well as built in wifi (note, there's also a version lacking the accelerometer which doesn't have 9DoF in the model). It will sync to an NTP server over wifi so it can accurately timestamp the data. In addition to the SD Card, you can either send the data to a server in your house or to a number of cloud services like ThingSpeak or AWS IoT (which at a quick glance appear to be the ones best suited to this application). With minimal effort you can have a cloud based dashboard that plots the data and could probably send yourself email alerts every time something hits your dock. You'd need to mount it inside a weather resistant enclosure and may want to apply a conformal coating.

Mount it in a box like this:
and power it via a USB-C charger.
 
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bigredfish

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Of the devices I linked above, the SparkFun DataLogger IoT 9DoF would be the simplest for your use case and cheapest of the ready to use devices I found.

It has a built in accelerometer, gyro, and magnetometer as well as built in wifi (note, there's also a version lacking the accelerometer which doesn't have 9DoF in the model). It will sync to an NTP server over wifi so it can accurately timestamp the data. In addition to the SD Card, you can either send the data to a server in your house or to a number of cloud services like ThingSpeak or AWS IoT (which at a quick glance appear to be the ones best suited to this application). With minimal effort you can have a cloud based dashboard that plots the data and could probably send yourself email alerts every time something hits your dock. You'd need to mount it inside a weather resistant enclosure and may want to apply a conformal coating.

Mount it in a box like this:
and power it via a USB-C charger.
Thank you
 
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mattp

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Nice. I like sparkfun.
Here's a solenoid operated valve if you want to figure out how to spray them with a sprinkler or something like that:
 

tangent

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Nice. I like sparkfun.
Here's a solenoid operated valve if you want to figure out how to spray them with a sprinkler or something like that:
With this data logger product, you're paying a bit of a premium for the software they made, which isn't open source. So, you aren't going to be able to just easily use this board to trigger a relay without writing your own software. Easier to use something else for any outputs.

Just making it easy to find the footage of all the impacts should be a significant gain. Fun as it might be to rig up an electric start trash pump (firehose of canal water), it probably wouldn't be worth the ensuing lawsuit.
 

mattp

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Yeah, you're probably right...but, it's just water...
I think there are a couple things that could be done that were mentioned.
1 put some metal bollards up in front of the pier.
2 regardless of if you do 1. Putting lateral boards up will greatly reduce the impact. If lateral boards were up that would have been a "glancing" blow instead of completely stopping the boat.
Here in Louisiana we still use timber fenders for some of our bridge pier protection systems. All of them are designed with lateral boards that wrap around the piers. I've seen barges go through and they rub up against them.
It's not ideal, but nothing protrudes to grab the vessels.
 
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