Rov Reboot (3D Printed Rov)

[Bindo]

Well after much deliberation, and because i am both cheap, and a tinkerer, i went with the CTC Dual (Makerbot clone).

£280 incl free delivery and 1kg of PLA to get you started

It doesn't have the hot end ducting/blower, but i guess i'll just print one out and add a fan



the first thing i made? a little scraper type thing for removing prints from the print bed....

[sthone]

Cool can't wait to see what you come up with... having a printer will definitally open up some new areas for you.

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Not much of an update but I've been prepping the float for a quick paint job. I gave the float a rough sand, then covered it with spot glazing putty to fill in some of the imperfections of 3D printing and to try and hide the joint, then a bit more sanding. It's far from perfect but better than nothing I guess.

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A few coats of primer and some more sanding and it's ready for some paint. It looks a lot smoother in the picture than it really is but over all I'm happy with it. I'm going to go with a Florescent green for high visibility.

-Steve

[Ian MacKenzie]

Nice. Can't wait to see it done.

[sthone]

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Here is the finished and painted float pod. It's hard to get a good picture of the true color and the seam still shows but overall I'm happy with how it came out. I have still yet to test how much buoyancy it will provide (I'm kind of scare to find out at this point) but I'll get around to it sooner or later.

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This is the camera I bought to test out. Its a PC600XS Day/Night Color Board Camera from Supercircuits. It boasts 700 Lines of Resolution with a 1/3" 960H Sony ExView Super HAD CCD II imager and a 0.0001 Lux Rating. I've only briefly tested it out so I don't know how well it's going to work yet. It's suppose to produce True Color Images but I think it's only color and then switches to B/W at night so that might be a little disappointing. At $90 it wasn't overly expensive but still not a cheap as some other small board cameras that are around. Hopefully the low Lux rating is worth it.

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I had this 1/8" thick clear tube laying around for years and while its a little scratched up it should work for a camera tube for now. I need to make some endcaps for it on the lathe but I don't have any stock to make them from yet so I next I will be designing the camera mount for inside the tube. I think I have a small geared motor somewhere too so the mount might incorporate a tilt mechanism into it too.

Back to the CAD.......

-Steve

[sthone]

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This is a quick rendering of the first prototype of my camera pod for the Rov.

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This is what I came up with for the inner working of the camera mount. I was able to incorporate a tilt mechanism into it and the pieces will be 3d printed (of course). I designed the mounts base piece so just slides into the camera tube and is just held in place by spring pressure of the base side walls on the camera tube.

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The motor I had turns at 58 RPM which is a little to fast for direct drive so I added a few gears to hopefully slow down the tilt rate enough.

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The camera wires are all going to run through the center of the pivot tube...

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... so to keep the wires from ever being twisted too much if the camera was ever tilted around in one direction to many times I added a stop to the pivot shaft to eliminate that possibility.

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There's no way to put limit switches in here so I used a ball and dent on the shaft to incorporate a clutch like mechanism into the outer gear. When the stop on the pivot shaft hits the ball should just compress the spring and jump to the next dent allowing the motor to keep spinning with out breaking or stripping the gears.

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Last but not least and exploded diagram of all the bits and pieces.

Time to fire up the printer and see how well I did..........

-Steve

[Jaman42]

I just reread the thread and I must say it's inspiring, it makes me want to get a 3D printer. During the next year I suspect I might feel that I need one

[sthone]

I'm not going to lie these 3D printers are frigging amazing, I wish I had one 20 years ago.

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I printed the base piece first to make sure the motor would fit and the base would fit well enough in the tube.

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Everything fit pretty well so far and the spring action walls seem to hold the base in the tube well enough.

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The rest of the piece where printed in one go. I printed the camera arm and pivot shaft in two separate pieces to make it easier to print and I will just glue it together later. I also printed an extra gear and e-clip just encase they needed a little fitting.

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After a little clean up all the parts ready to be assembled.

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Here is the assembled camera mount... so far everything is looking good.

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The back side... the e-clip needs to be a bit smaller so it doesn't hit the motor when the shaft is rotating.

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It still rotates a little faster than I would have liked (I'll have to take some video later) maybe I can slow it down with a resistor. It might need a few adjustments but so far it seems like it should work out.

I still need to get some tiny screws to hold the camera to the mount before I can fully test it.

-Steve

[sthone]

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I made a few small design changes today to try an improve things a little. I added a few more dents for the clutch ball on the pivot pin for smoother transitions, added a bit more shaft support to the clutch gear, and the big change I made was to make the drive gear a little smaller so hopefully that will slow the tilt down just a bit.

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Here's a cut away picture just to show how things mesh.

Back to the printer for round two.....

-Steve

[ROVER3D]

nice work!
are you also plan to pan/tilt lights?

[sthone]

Probably not... I thought about adding lights in the tube and rotating the entire tube but the tether really isn't wired for extra lights so for this Rov I'll probably just use battery powered dive flashlights or something simple like that.... I really haven't figured that part out yet to be honest.

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Here's the finished Camera Mount... with the exception of one of the camera screws not lining up (I drilled the holes off I guess the screws are so tiny) everything works great. The tilt speed with the new gears is perfect now and with the added shaft support I added to the clutch gear the gears mesh up perfect too. I'm very happy with how everything came out. I was a little concerned with how small the teeth were and whether or not they were going to print right but everyday this Makergear printer just amazes me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqKdrQoMw6g

A not so exciting video of it in action...

Now I just have to order some stock to make the end caps.. and then continue on with the design.

-Steve