Hi everyone, I have been looking in this forum for a while and have gotten a lot of inspiration from other people's builds and decided it's time to start my own. I really like the robust look of huge work class ROV's and want to make a scaled down version of one myself.
here is a photo for reference
- work class ROV.jpg (41.29 KiB) Viewed 564 times
For the frame I was thinking using aluminium extrusions and mounting the thrusters, electronics, LEDs and other stuff there and using some kind of foam on top for buoyancy. I want six thrusters where four of them are arranged in vectored configuration to move in any direction in the horizontal plane and yaw and two thrusters for vertical movement (unlike in the photo where it has four). The gripper will come later, I first want to make something that works properly before I add more advanced features. Everything will be controlled by an arduino mega in the ROV and an arduino uno topside which will be connected with a 100m cat5 cable via RS485 full duplex (or half duplex) communication. I haven't decided on the camera system yet but will probably just use one of the twisted pairs on the cat5 cable to send the signal.
For the controls topside, It will have an arduino uno as mentioned to which will be connected an analog joystick for the horizontal thrusters and a couple of switches to control the LEDs and up and down movement.
I don"t really know what to do with the video signal yet, should I connect it to the arduino and then to a display? I want some telemetry data overlay on the video display like depth, temperature and heading but not really sure how to do this.
Any help or suggestions for this project is much appreciated. I could really use some of your own experiences to help me as It's my first ROV build and probably too ambitious
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