Homebuilt ROVs Forum

Look for my post about the "Dragon OSD+". It's a $100 OSD board designed for RC Aircraft FPV but can also be used in a ROV. It will talk to just about any I2C instrument so can be made to work with a depth sensor. Depth sensors can be pretty pricey btw. You can contact Dragon Labs directly...

If you use two vertical thrusters, you can put them on either side of the housing like JW Fisher's: http://www.jwfishers.com/graphics/sl2a.gif Or you can put them at each end of the housing like the GNOM: http://www.gnom-rov.com/_files/en/products/im/73.jpg The advantage to doing it like the GNOM is...

There are a lot of low cost OSD's out there, just visit the RC Groups forums and go to the FPV section and you'll find tons of info. The reason I went with the DragonLabs OSD+ was because it was the only low cost OSD I found that can plug and play with an off the shelf compass. If you're up to writi...

No problem. The most expensive part of the whole thing was the compass. The DragonLabs OSD+ was only about $100. Besides a compass, it also supports other I2C devices so you can add tons of other devices if you want (humidity, depth, etc.) and it also includes servo controls for an autopilot so ther...

No doubt DIY will be much less expensive while also being much more educational... but for those of use without the skills to design / build a custom system like this, the price is pretty darn reasonable. I was just looking at what JW Fisher charges to add compass and depth display to their ROV and ...

The reason you don't see it done this way on most ROVs is that the prop would stir up the silt on the bottom and then visibility would be lost. Can you mount 2 thrusters instead? One on each side of the cylinder? Take a look at the JW Fisher ROV to see how they've done it for ideas.

If you can wait a little while we may be selling our nearly new VideoRay Scout that has been upgraded to a larger video display, high resolution low lux camera, and most importantly, a built in 3 axis stabilized digital compass and video overlay. You can see the compass / osd in operation here: http...

I recently retrofitted an off the shelf video overlay system (HUD) and digital compass into a VideoRay Scout. The first test of the system can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmp8o6xb98w My apologies for the boring video, visibility was around 6 inches (3 cm) that day. I just got an upd...