Asked and answered

No. The Commander is drawn and laid out, and its firmware has been run against a simulated boat, but no board has been built yet. A hand-wired prototype comes next, then the first boards, then trials on the bench and in the water.

If the trials pass, the first batch will be funded on Kickstarter, planned for April 2027. You can join the launch list to be told when it opens. That costs nothing and commits you to nothing.

The planned pledge for a Commander is £89 plus postage. The first 15 backers get an early-bird level of £79.

These are plans. They are fixed on the day the campaign opens and not before. The planned levels.

From the bottom up: the parts at distributor prices, the bare boards and a stencil, VAT, a bag and a box, an allowance of 8 per cent for boards that fail test, Kickstarter's and the card company's fees, and the one-off costs of a proving round of boards and the compliance work. What is left pays for the time to build each board by hand, about an hour and a half.

Three figures are still estimates and not quotes: the parts total, the price of the pressure sensor and the cost of the compliance work. If any comes in much higher, the pledge level changes before the campaign opens, not after.

One Commander: assembled, with its Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W soldered on and the firmware loaded, tested on a rig before it is posted, and the instructions.

Not the things that differ from boat to boat: tanks, servos, battery, receiver, reed switch and magnet, pressure tube, water probes.

Kickstarter is all or nothing. If pledges do not reach the goal, nobody is charged and no boards are made. We would write to the launch list to say what happens next.

The plan is September 2027, about four months after the campaign ends. That allows for ordering parts, building and testing each board by hand, and the compliance paperwork. The timetable shows each step.

Every date depends on the prototypes. If the trials find faults, everything after them moves.

The plan is the United Kingdom only at launch. Other countries need their own approvals and tax arrangements, and that is not decided. Put your country on the launch-list form: it tells us where the interest is.

We cannot give a date. Both are designed, and both wait until the Commander has been built and proved. Tick them on the launch-list form and you will hear when there is news.

It is made for boats with two piston tanks, bow and stern, where a motor drives each piston and a pot reports its position. It also has the leak detector, battery monitor, gas blow, lights and torpedo outputs.

A boat whose tank is filled and emptied by a reversible pump wants the Mini, which comes later.

No. The rudder servo and the speed controller plug into the receiver, as in any model boat. The board's BOAT terminal switches their battery supply, up to about 6 A: on with the magnet, off from the phone or by the timer. A bigger drive motor takes its supply straight from the battery.

The Commander takes ordinary servo pulses from any receiver, at 3.3 V or 5 V, on up to eight channels.

For the lost-signal failsafe to work, the receiver must stop sending pulses when it loses the transmitter. If yours goes to preset positions instead, give it presets that bring the boat up: ballast to empty and planes to rise. A receiver that can only hold the last position gives the board nothing to detect, so with that kind the lost-signal failsafe cannot act.

Radio at 2.4 GHz is stopped by a few centimetres of water. Lower frequencies such as 40 MHz get through fresh water well enough to drive a submerged model. In the UK, 40 MHz is a band for surface models, which includes boats and submarines.

The pressure sensor reads to about 10 m of water in its catalogue version, and about 15 m in a wider-range version if the maker will supply it. You set a depth limit below which the board surfaces the boat. How deep the boat can safely go is a matter for its hull and seals, not for the board.

7 to 14 V at the board. A 3S lithium pack, a 12 V lead-acid battery or an eight or nine cell NiMH pack sit inside that. Ten NiMH cells are at the top edge when freshly charged, and a 2S lithium pack is at the bottom edge once it runs down.

Set the battery type on the Sensors tab so that the warning and cut-off voltages suit your pack. As it comes they are 11.5 V and 10.8 V, which suits a 12 V lead-acid battery.

There is no reverse-polarity protection, so use a connector that only fits one way.

The Pico 2 W is a ready-made board with the processor, its memory, the Wi-Fi radio and a USB socket on it. Raspberry Pi makes it in large numbers, has had its radio approved, and has said it will stay in production until at least 2040. Soldering one to a carrier keeps the hardest parts of the circuit out of a small hand-built batch, and means the controller can be bought anywhere if one ever has to be replaced.

No. The board makes its own Wi-Fi network. Join it with any phone, tablet or laptop and open 192.168.4.1 in the browser. There is no app, no account, and the internet is not involved.

No, and not under water in any case: Wi-Fi does not pass through water. The phone page is for setting up on the bench and at the surface. It can move the tanks in bench mode and try the lights, aerial and torpedo releases, but the boat is driven from your radio set.

If it does, or the set upsets the Wi-Fi, change the Wi-Fi channel on the Power tab. The password is changed there too.

Hold a magnet at the reed switch for about a second, until the lamp on the board lights. Switch off from the phone page. Left alone with no radio and no phone, the board switches itself off after ten minutes; that time can be changed.

Start it with the boat still and at the surface. It measures the surface pressure and the gyro's rest reading in the first two seconds.

No. It belongs in the dry part of the hull. The only thing that goes outside is a tube from the pressure sensor. Two probes tell you if water gets in.

Yes, over the Pico's micro-USB socket from a computer, with no programmer. The first load needs the Pico's BOOTSEL button held while the cable goes in; after that it does not.

Yes. The firmware (one Arduino sketch) and the phone setup page (one HTML file) will be published in full when the campaign opens, with the circuit diagram and the parts list. You can read exactly what the board does, change it, and load your own version over USB.

The licence the source is published under will be stated with it.

The free Arduino program, with the Arduino-Pico core added from its boards manager, and a USB lead. Choose the board "Raspberry Pi Pico 2W", open the sketch and press Upload. There is nothing to buy.

Yes. The published firmware loads the same way as your own, so the original can always be put back. Your settings are kept on the board and are reset only if the new firmware stores them differently.

The setup page can. Opened from a computer's disk it runs against a pretend boat, so a change to the page can be tried at a desk. A change to the firmware needs a board, or a Pico and the modules on a breadboard.

On a computer, yes. The board layout passes the design-rule check and matches its circuit diagram. The firmware is compiled for the Pico and has been run against a simulated boat with more than 350 automatic checks, and the setup page has been driven in a browser with more than 60.

That leaves a great deal unproved: the power and motor circuits under load, the sensors, the radio, heat. On hardware nothing has been tested at all, because nothing has been made. That is the reason nothing is on sale, and the reason the campaign waits for the trials.

Because there is nothing real to show. Kickstarter asks hardware projects for a working prototype and does not allow computer renderings in place of photographs. More to the point, a design that has only run on a computer will have faults that only real hardware shows. We would rather find them with our own money than with yours.

Yes. The circuits, the board layouts, the firmware, the phone setup pages and this website were drafted with an AI assistant (Claude, made by Anthropic), working to the designer's requirements and decisions. The design-rule checks and the simulated tests were run the same way.

That is one more reason for the order of events: nothing is offered until a person has built the board, measured it on the bench and sailed it. Every board sent to a backer is built and tested by hand. And the source is published, so anyone can check what it does.

Not yet. The Wi-Fi is a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, which Raspberry Pi supplies with its own radio approvals. The finished board still needs its own assessment and paperwork. That is in the campaign budget and will be done before any board is posted.

The rules on the security of connected products need attention too. As designed, every board starts with the same Wi-Fi password, which you are asked to change; before sale that has to become a password of its own for each board.

SubCommander is a trading name of Applied AI Solutions Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (number 17192679).

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