Hello all,
A few months ago, around when Titan imploded, I began my ROV journey to find treasure in the Hudson river. I spent hours of my time and far too much of my own money on a design that ultimately was doomed to fail from the beginning. I'll keep things brief, but I attempted to use 2" PVC for the hull, which ended up being far too cramped to work with comfortably, and ended up making all sorts of crazy modifications to my design in order to hopefully fit everything inside. This stunted my progress severely, but after another month or so of procrastination I finally bit the bullet and ordered a fresh batch of parts. I'm starting my design over from (mostly) scratch.
I'll document this much better, and I have photos and videos I've recorded along the way that I will be sure to attach when I make a proper project post in the correct section of this forum, but for now I'll do my best to describe my new and current design. The hull is 4" PVC pipe this time around, utilizing a female adapter and plug in the back for a slide out internal component tray, and a reducing coupling along with a 2" union in the front for a camera housing (as taken from Steve's site).
The ROV will be powered by an internal battery pack made up of 18650 lithium cells, and run by an arduino micro on board communicating over a CAT5 tether with another arduino at the surface. I'm utilizing an undersea connector design by https://thecavepearlproject.org/ which uses pex swivel adapters (this is a really cool idea, but so far very hard to execute the way I'd like, and will require a lot of work to perfect for my use case). Sensors and FPV camera choice are TBD. All of this will slide in and out of the main 4" hull, which itself will be suspended inside a seafox-esque frame of 1/2 or 3/4 PVC.
I'm excited to share more as the project continues and I look forward to hearing your feedback!