Over the course of the first few weeks of working on this project I drew up various paper prototypes and designs. Furthermore I thought about the design of the hardware needed to test and develop for this project.

The designs were shown to students and my stakeholders for feedback. We ended up going for a very simplistic and easy to use interface that would minimise any error during operation of the app. After all, some of the functions available in the app would have drastic consequences such as turning off the navigation or turning on the water pumps.

The hardware of the bluetooth module was also discussed. We needed something that would use a low amount of energy while still being able to operate at a reasonable speed. The HM_10 bluetooth module was chosen for this. This is a bluetooth low energy chip that would serve as a translation layer between the Android app and the backbone of the boat which uses proprietary protocols such as NMEA-1000 and NMEA-2000.

In the end we came up with two designs for this hardware:

• A small module, connectable via USB that houses the HM_10
• A bigger module, connectable via USB that houses the HM_10 and 10 programmable buttons

The end product for those can be seen below.