The first try to make an ROV

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JohanEricson
Posts: 3
Joined: Oct 2nd, 2017, 1:17 am

The first try to make an ROV

Post by JohanEricson »

We've got a course in electronic sensors, motors and signals coming up at the university, so I'm going to take this opportunity to make something I've wanted to make for a long time.
My very own ROV. The focus during this course is of course going to be the steering system and if there's time I'm going to do some calculations for a power supply and tether.

So far I've been doing some construction on paper and in my mind... So as soon as I get the time I'm going to do some Solid Works drawings of my construction and a flow chart of the control system. The final results will be shown to a couple of businesses that could have interests in our projects so I will make an extra effort to document a lot during the build and do the proper research beforehand and a budget, this to run the project somewhat like you would in a business. And if I am successful I could maybe use this in a job interview. Of course, there's not a lot of time to construct the actual ROV it self during university hours, but it would be very nice to have the final thing to show to the businesses.

For the control system I'm going to use an Arduino programmed with MakerHub LINX extension for LabView. I'm planning to use a PS3-controller via the computer to steer it. I'm pretty I under estimate the complexity of this... but I guess I'll find out!

At the moment I'm trying to warp my head around how to get the video feed to the surface, and the more I read the more I understand that I don't really understand. But I hope that reading this forum will clear some things up. But at the moment this is secondary since the course concerns the steering system.

One more thing that I realized I had overlooked is some kind of protection system for the motors. My plan is to use brushless DC motors and ESC's, so I'm not sure what to use to protect the circuits from burning out in case the motors get stuck in seaweed or something. So this requires some thought and research. I also didn't know that not all ESC's are able to run the motors backwards and I'm not actually sure about the one's I've bought. They were very cheap so I'm guessing they're not able to run backwards. I've got an idea to use a relay to flip the cables from the ESC to the motor to run backwards, but I'm not sure how this cheap fix will work.

I will try to keep this thread updated with what I find out during my journey.

I would also like to say that I have absolutely zero experience in this area so some solutions will probably not be the most sophisticated and hi-tech, But I would like to build a platform to develop over time as I learn new things at the university. I would also like to develop different "attachments" that I later on could use with the ROV like a gripper, a bottom scanner, a cave scanning system and so on.

So I hope that you guys will guide me through the tough parts and can enlighten me on some of the areas I've got trouble with.
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