Homebuilt ROVs Forum

Pilikia,

I believe that it was 3/8" inner diameter rubber hose. I don't think that the pneumatic lines really contributed much to the overall buoyancy of the tether, definitely not enough to counteract the weight of the 10 AWG conductors.

Clayton

Pilikia, Thanks for checking out our ROV. It was quite an experience working on it. The function of the oil cap was to stop a simulated flow of "oil", coming from a PVC pipe assembly. The oil cap was attached to our ROV with a pneumatic piston that locked it in place. When we maneuvered th...

I forgot to ask, which team were you on AHarris?

To be honest, we were a bit surprised ourselves. The oil cap was not part of the original design, and it added a considerable amount of weight to the ROV. It made it much harder to control with it still connected to the ROV. Without the oil cap, the vectored thruster placement does provide a great d...

A 1/4" pneumatic hose sounds like a pretty small diameter hose to be running cables in. Plus it would probably be a real pain to have to push a bunch of wires through any length of pneumatic hose long enough to be a useful tether. For the Purdue ROV, we needed a 100' tether, and it contained: 2...

This product from sparkfun is practically the same thing. I can't believe that they can justify the $1900 cost... The only difference is that you might have to do some of your own programming, but I think that there is plenty of example code available online to get started. http://www.sparkfun.com/p...

The following website documents all of the work that the Purdue University ROV Team did to get our ROV, ROV Hybris, ready for the 2011 MATE Competition in Houston, Texas. Our team had a pretty amazing time at the NASA Neutral Bouyancy Lab, where we placed 2nd in the MATE Competition. We even got to ...

Its not really about the voltage along the tether, but the current. The larger the current load, the larger the gauge of the wire must be. These approximations are usually based upon temperature increase in open air, so small gauges can be used underwater. I would not want to rely on the voltage dro...

Thanks guys.

mr7n, are you planning on competing in the explorer class or ranger?

The after travel costs to get 5 people and gear to Hawaii last year, the motors were the most expensive part of the entire vehicle. We got 6 Seabotix motors which were not cheap, but they are pretty nice. Also PWM motor control was pretty nice to have, although it took a fair bit of extra time to de...