Scout Mk1

[Ianth3impler]

I have been into ROV's almost my whole life. About 12ish years ago as a teenager I stumbled across HomebuiltROVs while I was working on a science fair project. I built a ROV out of PVC pipes and bilge pumps I had laying around, using a relay system in candle wax using Cat5 cable to control it while my power went down a 16 gauge speaker wire from a 12v mower battery. I tired everything to get live video but just ended up putting my cell phone at the time in a waterproof clear case and watching the video after blindly driving around. The project was shelved after I got my scuba cert at 13, however I dove into electronics, drones, RC cars/ planes/ boats/ rockets and even the occasional potato gun that I fired a apple through the shop wall into the kitchen. Fast forward 12ish years I have acquired myself quite the work shop and tools and am ready to try this again after meeting a random dude through a buddy who ended up having a lot in common with me and subliminally encourage me to have another go at this so this is my project Scout MK1. I started on it this morning so bare with me. I just started over the past two months getting comfortable with CAD after fighting it for so long. After drawing up some parts and CNCing them out this morning I realized I wanted to change some stuff almost immediately picutres are kinda out of order.

[Ianth3impler]

First CNC of the foam.

[Ianth3impler]

Current work for today is to get main aluminum plate that everything mounts to machined. In the mean time my 3D printer has been mindlessly running for over 40 hours to print out the thrusters, I should have all 3 of my printers up and running but that's a hassle. The main focus is the aluminum plate. I tried to machine it yesterday but my CNC didn’t like the Gcode for some reason. The foam milled out perfectly earlier in the day.

[Ianth3impler]

Update for today: After struggling for a couple of hours I figured out my CAM processor sometimes makes the right Gcode for my CNC controller. I am still learning how to run CNC machines, I own 3, one I completely updated the electronics from the 90’s and got it running 100% this week. The aluminum sign I picked up from a scrap shop a few weeks ago for cheap along with about 30lbs of aluminum scrap. The sign wasn’t perfectly flat so the center finish isn’t too perfect but I couldn’t be happier with it. I want Scout to look professional which for me is a new way about inventing stuff for me, I build things to work but they don’t always look pretty so I’m challenging myself with this task not with this but future Drones/UAVs/ Planes Ect.. So I have been thinking about what am I going to use as a body to house electronics I really don’t want to use PVC or acrylic, Aluminum is nice but I wanted to make this unique so I’m going to use a 4 inch piece of Carbon fibre tube that I made a while back for a long range UAV. Here are the pictures of today's adventures the only reason why you guys actually click on pages.

[Ianth3impler]

Not much planed for today. I practiced cutting out a PCB board for power distribution. 5 out of six thrusters printed the last one is on the printer now. I may do a little CAD work today for the electronics tray. But I’m waiting for my largest printer to get done so I can print the rail system. I’m planning on reinforcing the 4 inch Carbon fiber tube with about 4 more layers tomorrow and covering the foam float in epoxy to seal it to get it ready to be wrapped in carbon fiber and vacuumed bagged.

[Oddmar]

1. Your avatar pic (m249's or m240's?) makes me think of Burt Gummer arguing with his wife Heather on the roof about which gun is better, and therefore worth carrying with them. (Tremors) "Should we take the .300 Win Mag or the .22-250?"

2. Is that syntactic foam or just regular blue extruded polystyrene? Cause XPS will crush under pressure.

3. I'd go with aluminum pipe for both strength and heat dissipation, as well as ease of welding. You can get a carbon-fiber vinyl wrap if you want to make it look 'pretty'. Carbon-fiber is gonna be hard to mount stuff to...easily.

4. I'm widely skilled but don't earn much $$, so i've just managed to buy most of the parts for my CNC table build. I'm making it 5'x10', because that's the biggest that will fit when hoisted up onto the ceiling of my garage (for storage). The gantry will fold down and the legs fold up.
After watching a Youtube video where a guy explains the noise difference between using a router and a spindle motor, now i need to source a spindle motor. I've found a small one with controller for $52, but most of the larger ones seem to run about $400. Did you buy that one as part of the CNC table or separately?

5. I'll be using Mach 4 Hobby, but i've heard that DesignSpark Mechanical CAD software is the easiest, most intuitive software to use/learn. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXgMY3-hlgs

[Ianth3impler]

1. They are 240's 7.62, Tremors is a great movie!

2.I’m pretty sure its just extruded foam, I did have some concerns with it imploding on itself or being crushed so I’m going to coat it in epoxy to give it a layer of water proofing then a few 1 Oz coats of of glass cloth and then a final sheet of Carbon fiber vacuumed bagged over it. Hopefully that works if not it will have a tether to pull it from its watery grave lol “learning experiences”

3.I have this carbon fiber tube that I laid up that is extremely stiff that is just sitting around. For good measure I’m going to give it a rough sanding and give it a few apposing 45 degree lay ups. Honestly this falls into the learning experience/ curve. No one has done it that I have seen and its super easy to make and the price has came way down for CF cloth. I already CAD’ed everything up and am pretty happy with how it works. If this tube fails then I’ll go to aluminum which I'm going to start machining everything out of in the future anyways.

4.What type of CNC do you want a mill or a router? The largish CNC actually isn't mine it is a buddy of mine who bought it and it had the old 1993 electronics that I couldn’t get to run. I am currently building a larger 5x5 foot CNC from scratch using heavy hardware in hopes that it will be sturdy enough to make it a 4-6 axis machine. I am very new to CNCing like I just successfully ran this largish machine by myself this week. All the electronics on this machine now were intended for my large CNC. I haven't decided on the spindle yet but I will say I highly recommend something that is water cooled and has a VFD. I also Highly recommend CNC’s and 3D printers to anyone who likes to make stuff the price fir a good printer is about 220$ look at the ender 3. It cuts your building time in half.

5.I have 2 small CNC’s a cheap 3018 that I use for test cutting small stuff like circuit boards, engraving dicks into things, and making small templates. I have been fighting this thing for 6 months but I have figured out how to use it. The second small CNC is a stout 3/4inch thick aluminum gantry with a nice spindle. I bought this from a guy on offer up who use to be a machinist, and he actually ended up becoming a very good friend of mine. I bought that CNC to actually cut the side plate bolt holes for the gantry on scratch built CNC because I suck at precision drilling. I would look into the DDCSV 3.1 controller not mach 4. It’s very easy to run, I can make something in Fusion 360 (which is free by the way) have it spit out the GCODE for the controller and its good to run in minutes. I cut both of those foam boards in about 20 minutes and that included the design and redesign.

[Ianth3impler]

Worked on a couple of different parts for scout today. I CAD’ed up a flange that I tired to CNC out of MDF (particle board) so I could ram up a sand cast and pour a aluminum one but I need to re do the CAM for it the feeds and speeds were way to high. So I moved on to another couple of projects, I started to print out the rail system to hold the tube and vertical thrusters, however I should have been smart enough to realize that that the perfect tolerances that CAM software gives me doesn't transfer over to a 3d printer too well so I had to resize the rail and reprint it for it to fit into the slot I machined into the aluminum plate. While that has been printing I have started to pull out electronics and build thrusters. In the mean time I have not found any viable (cheapish) 30 amp forward/reverse RC car brushless ESC’s for this build, so I’m having my Nerd friend Rion design a PCB set up and write some code for it. I will get as far as I can for now but I may need to order some more motors, disposable cups, paint brushes, and some vacuum bag material all for the Carbon fiber/ Glass lay up process. I did find out that using a soldering iron to smooth out and anneal 3D prints works amazingly, I did it on the thruster props to smooth them up and it ended up making them a little stiffer too

[Ianth3impler]

Not bad for 5 days of work.

[Ianth3impler]

Added a few layers of Carbon fiber to body tube to stiffen it up more also covered the foam in epoxy the first coat of water proofing. I need to order more stuff I didn’t realize that I was almost out of quite a few lay up items so It may be a week or more before I can get around to ordering more in the mean time I’m working on an electronics tray and water tight flanges for the body.