Navigation

[Forest]

What are you guys using for navigation. I need to put some sort of navigation in my rov what do you think I should use. My ROV is a sea fox. :

[ROV-Control]

I use a 3-axis magnetometer with 3-axis position compensation. And the camera of course. There are no other possibilities either you have a sonar head

[SoakedinVancouver]

I have seen flooded compass, mounted low and at the front of the ROV, the pilot would point down the camera at it, therefore knowing its heading. Also, there used to be some little hanging coils in a pressure sphere, plus some electronics, I forget what we called those but (Radio-Shack used to sell something like that for cars, the first "electronic compass") they would be easily calibrated on the surface (by moving the ROV about, North, South, etc.., and tweaking the output signal accordingly).

Nowadays, you can get true electronic compass pretty cheap (even in Canada!) but I do not know if they would be hackable when it comes to getting an electronic output.

Stephen Y.

[Seadragon]

This would be skippy but the wife would get really, really mad:

http://www.microstrain.com/3dm-gx3-25.a ... TGc_OQ#buy

[ckleppin]

This product from sparkfun is practically the same thing. I can't believe that they can justify the $1900 cost... The only difference is that you might have to do some of your own programming, but I think that there is plenty of example code available online to get started.

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10736

[Seadragon]

Excellent post maybe some government surplus has something else. I will look further.