Need ROV Building Advice

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bigbellydude
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Need ROV Building Advice

Post by bigbellydude »

Hi All,

I am the Pilot for a Ranger team in the MATE ROV competition next year, and we all dived in head first. However, we have learned that we need to provide our own motors and control thingy for controlling motion. None of us are real programmers, and our budget is very low. We need some advice: what kind of motor to use (we need at least 3), what kind of tether to use, types of controllers, how to wire all of this into the camera or to keep that separate, etc. We also would love some advice about shape, size, and general how-to for the frame. Any ideas? We really appreciate it.

Josh.
ckleppin
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Re: Need ROV Building Advice

Post by ckleppin »

I would look into bilge pump motors. They can be modified pretty easily. Those are probably the cheapest way to go for motors. For controllers, you might want to look at the Arduino. Although it does require some programming, it is pretty easy to learn and there is a lot of documentation available for it. I would also look into relay circuits for turning the motors off and on.

Clayton
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sthone
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Re: Need ROV Building Advice

Post by sthone »

The standard basic configuration of a ROV is a minimum of three thrusters like you said, there are a few different configurations even with only three thrusters but the most popular is two horizontal thrusters in the rear for Forward/Reverse/Left/Right and one vertical thrusters for Up/Down. Clearly these will all be mounted to a frame of some sort. Control can be as simple as just switches directly wired to the thrusters or you can use a simple relay setup and arcade type joystick to control everything.

Before going into to much detail though and overwhelming you :) I would suggest looking at what past teams have done to get some kind of idea what to expect. A good place to do this is on the MATE Site itself, you can look in the archives to see what past teams have had to do and also look at the tech reports. (I have direct links on the links page on my site if you can't find them on the MATE Site.)

Some of your design is going to depend on what you have to do though, I know they haven't listed the mission tasks yet but I've been told it should be up by Dec 3rd.

-Steve
ckleppin
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Re: Need ROV Building Advice

Post by ckleppin »

I should be able to find a .pdf of the Purdue University team tech reports from the 2009 and 2010 competition if you are interested. It is a little more technical then what you might be looking for, but there might be some useful information that you can use.
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bigbellydude
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Re: Need ROV Building Advice

Post by bigbellydude »

Just woke up, got straight on computer, and went straight to forum. Thanks Steve and ckleppin. We are looking at bilge pumps, specifically the Johnson Mayfair replacement cartridges on Cabelas. http://www.cabelas.com/product/Johnson- ... tt=mayfair This is the page. They do appear decently priced, but my team members want to wait the extra couple days for the specs to come out before we purchase them.

We met last night, and we all agreed that a rectangular shape seems to perform the best. We were thinking that it should be pretty much flat, meaning that if you looked at it from the back, the struts supporting the top of the ROV would be about half of the width. It also would be longer, so that from the top it would not appear square, but rectangular. I hope this is cohesive. I do have AutoCAD, and I know how to use it, but when I got it from the school, I found that we would have to personally buy a new product key because someone else used it and didn't include the activation code. :twisted: Therefore, I can't make a accurate drawing of it at this time.

We actually toyed with running an Ethernet cable down, and then converting it to USB so that we could bring a computer and just use the arrow keys. :lol: After more research, this looks like it would mean purchases that wouldn't fit in with our budget. As for relays, I do have maybe 50 of the standard house electrical box relays, would these do?

One last thing, because we are participating in the Ranger category, we are required to use a camera. They are probably going to show us how to connect it to the monitor, but for my insatiable curious technical mind, does anyone know how to do that?

And YES!!! We would love that. We are all electronically minded, so we should be able to figure it out, and if we can't, we'll ask some of our numerous Ham Radio friends.

Again, thanks for all your help. Josh
Last edited by bigbellydude on Nov 30th, 2010, 12:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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bigbellydude
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Re: Need ROV Building Advice

Post by bigbellydude »

Where can we find a decently priced Arduino board? Where could we find specs and it, and (the fatal question) How could we connect it to cat5e? I have limited Internet access cause of parental controls (my mom is paranoid) but if I had a couple of URLs I could ask her to allow those sites.
ckleppin
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Re: Need ROV Building Advice

Post by ckleppin »

I was only able to find our 2010 Tech Report, but I don't seem to be able to upload a pdf. I can email it to you if you wish.

http://www.sparkfun.com/

The above website has all sorts of good electronic stuff, including a handful of different types of arduinos. There is a version that has built in Ethernet jack, but from personal experience, Ethernet is pretty difficult to deal with. The included Ethernet libraries might make it pretty easy though. Also, if you are using an arduino, check out

http://www.pygame.org/news.html

It makes it pretty easy to interface a controller to an arduino.

Clayton
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bigbellydude
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Re: Need ROV Building Advice

Post by bigbellydude »

Thanks Clayton. I believe that the libraries from pygames are Python? I have no experience with it, but I am sure that I could learn it. It would make a great LIFE tile, too! ;)
ckleppin
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Re: Need ROV Building Advice

Post by ckleppin »

Yeah, they are in python, but if you also get the pyserial libraries, you can at least communicate with the arduino. Python is not really my favorite language to code in, but it works reasonably well.

http://pyserial.sourceforge.net/
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bigbellydude
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Re: Need ROV Building Advice

Post by bigbellydude »

Thanks, I'll check it out. Shouldn't be too hard to decipher! :)
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