This is an ROV project I've been working on for a while (in between browsing this forum!) it's main purpose is just to have a look around Skagen harbor in Denmark, so it's only intended to go down to about 5-10M (next versions will hopefully do more). As you can see it has lasercut plexiglass side panels where the bilge pumps are mounted, and a hull in the middle where all the electronics are stored. The ROV has 4 bilge pumps, with the two vertical ones for up/down movement and the other two for forward/backwards and turning. The two vertical ones is probably overkill, but I couldn't find a way to position them with an imbalance of weight. All the green and black parts are 3d printed, so those are the parts that hold the motors and the hull in place. There are 10mm stainless steel rods that connect the whole thing together, I chose to do it like this so it could be modified easily.
I designed the whole ROV in Onshape, an online CAD software that I would really recommend The hull is made of PVC and has end caps, which I'll show soon enough when they are ready and watertight, the whole robots runs off a 11.1 V battery inside, this battery provides power to an arduino uno inside the hull which controls all the bilge pumps through motor controllers. The arduino "talks" to a PyBoard on the surface through 9600 Baud serial and a 30M cable containing the 3 wires need for serial, I choose the board as it allows you to program in Python which I'm much more familiar with then C. Live video is provided to the surface through a USB webcam in the robot, this USB signal is passed through a 30M Ethernet cable and converted back to USB on the surface, there is no power increase or anything, you just plug it in and amazingly it works!
Since I've been building this for a while I don't have any build photos, the entire system was tested just before Easter where I wired everything up, and was going to waterproof it so it would be ready for the sea, but I decided to redo the wiring and add a grabber, which I'm working on now. The ROV is at the moment very heavy so I also need to figure out how to stick some floats on it, which is just one of many things to be done!
Please give feedback! I haven't tried it in water yet, what are your thoughts?
-MantFish
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