Project Bob: The autonomous boat attempting to circle the globe with open source and Grafana

Andrew McCalip works with satellites and spacecraft, so he’s no stranger to ambitious engineering challenges. His latest side project may be his boldest yet.

Project Bob aims to be the first autonomous boat to circumnavigate the globe. Open source tools will monitor every detail on the 14-foot, solar-powered vessel, from power levels to location and heading, in real time. And it will use onboard cameras, sensors and a Starlink antenna to stream live video and telemetry data to the public via a custom Grafana Cloud dashboard.

McCalip shared the story of Project Bob at his recent GrafanaCON 2025 talk, demonstrating the power of today’s open source software in tackling real-world engineering challenges.

“I haven’t really done software in 10 years,” he said. “So I come back, and there’s this whole sprawling ecosystem of wonderful tools that wasn’t there the first time.”

From furnace door to open ocean

McCalip is head of research and development at Varda Space Industries, but he may be better known for the self-proclaimed “weird hobbies” he documents for his 69,000 followers on X. During his most famous project—attempting to recreate LK-99, a purported room-temperature superconductor—about 15,000 people were glued to a live stream of a furnace door with a Grafana Labs temperature plot.

“They gave me the idea, like, ‘Hey, can we do more really boring live streams?’” McCalip recalled. “And so that was kind of the genesis of this idea. Can we do an orbit? Can we do a really boring live stream? And can we engage the public as we build with these cool tools?”

He launched a Kickstarter campaign for Project Bob, which met its funding goal in one day. Then he and a group of engineers got to designing a small, rugged drone boat capable of staying at sea for months on its own. That meant it had to be energy efficient, self-sustaining, and able to recover from failure with no human intervention.

“Once we send this thing off, there’s no way to ever get to it again,” McCalip said. “We’ve got one chance.”

One goal: ‘Don’t sink’

The team tested two designs—an aerodynamic, fiberglass hull and a rugged (but slow) modified kayak stuffed with batteries and foam—and built them on nights and weekends.

“It’s a little bit of a race between the two designs,” McCalip said. “We’re launching number two first, and then one will catch up later.”

As with past projects, he documented the process in public. He installed solar panels on the roof of his workplace, experimented in a makeshift dev environment, and put the vessels out on the water at a local marina.

“The number-one goal was don’t sink, and we did not sink,” McCalip said. “We did hit a few boats. There was some lag, and once we got out of range of the Wi-Fi, we lost Wi-Fi connection to the boat, and it ran away from us. But other than that, it’s been good.”

To test the boat’s GPS capabilities, he even monitored a Grafana dashboard from the passenger seat of a truck en route to the marina.

“I am sitting in the truck, we’ve got Grafana open, we’re streaming video through Starlink, through Tailscale, back down to the laptop as we drive down the 405 in Los Angeles,” he said. “That was kind of fun. We got a couple strange looks.”

Grafana at the helm

Project Bob runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 14 Docker containers controlling the propulsion system, motors, GPS, accelerometers, magnetometers, IP cameras and more. Each container communicates through Redis, the open source in-memory data store, and collects data with Telegraf, the open source server agent. That data is stored in an onboard InfluxDB instance, and it syncs daily over a Tailscale-secured Starlink connection to a cloud replica hosted on Google Cloud Platform. From there, the team pushes metrics to Grafana Cloud for visualization.

Those visualizations play a key role in the monitoring and operating of the boat. In particular, a first-person-view dashboard with video and embedded controls allows the team to steer and change speed when needed. Backed by a robust, near-real-time data pipeline, the team is also able to use Open Broadcaster software to create a single streaming video with Grafana dashboards overlaid on top of the boat’s camera footage. This allows viewers on YouTube to see what the boat sees and how it’s performing.

25,000 miles to go

To officially circumnavigate the globe, Project Bob must take a route that crosses the equator twice, passes through the point on Earth directly opposite Los Angeles (a spot in the Indian Ocean off the southern coast of Madagascar) and avoids all canals. If all goes well, the 25,000-mile voyage will see the boat pass around South America, Africa, and Australia before returning home.

McCalip acknowledged that’s a big if. But he and his team are up for the challenge.

“I don’t think that we’re going to make it the first time, but we’re going to keep trying until we get it,” he said. “This would be a world record if we can pull it off.”

Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and more. We have a generous forever-free tier and plans for every use case. Sign up for free now!