First ROV Project

[pacman411]

Hello all

I am in the begining stage of design for my first ROV project I been reading the forum my question is how many motor can the Arduinoor or the 8051 handle. Also has any one try and of the PIC16/24or 32 chips set

Paul

[gumma]

Arduino uno or duemillanove can handle 6 pwm channels if you use dc motors. If you use brushless motors you can drive one motor on each digital pin so that should be enough. I started designing my ROV with PIC16f84, after that with PIC 18f1330 with PWMs and i had lot of problems. Programming PICs takes a lot of time cause you'll program it 100 times before you are pleased with your program. Every time you need to attach it to programmer and deattach it, so PLEASE use arduino. Support for Arduino is huge so you wont't have any problems if you have some programming experience.

[Joe]

I've worked with PIC 12F, 16F, and 18F chips. I would highly recommend them to anyone who plans to make this their hobby for a long time. They're easy to program with PIC BASIC Pro. You also need to learn a bit about their architecture on a hardware level to really program them quickly... this can be a bit of a learning curve. But the PICs are cheap and military spec, so you can even power them up backwards for a short time and they'll survive. The most complex system I've built for an ROV used nine 18F1320's to create a control system with fly-by-wire, making the ROV automatically stabilize it's depth and attitude. (MATE ROV 2010 competitor Sea-Tech 4H, Eclipse ROV)

I actually designed the architecture as a 'net' of PICs, all operating at an equivalent level and knowing how to work together. This also allowed one PIC to take over the job of another in case of a failure. Very powerful devices, but they take a while to really know them well.

[thegadgetguy]

While the Arduino may not be the most powerful/best micro controller for the job, it's really easy to work with and has a great knowledge base. If you have experience with PICs and want to use them, go for it. But if this is your first ROV, and you want to keep things simpler, go with the Arduino.