Homebuilt ROVs Forum

Got to test a motor today in freshwater and salt due to having a freshwater aquarium and a reef tank. My most important project is getting the end flanges cast everything else is just waiting for stuff to come in the mail. I have a pretty good idea on how I’m going to waterproof the through hulls. Battery wise I will be making my own 3 cell 17000Mah battery from 20700 cells more to come on that. I will post as much as I can over the next week but it will probably be slow.

Ianth3impler wrote: In the mean time I have not found any viable (cheapish) 30 amp forward/reverse RC car brushless ESC’s for this build, so I’m having my Nerd friend Rion design a PCB set up and write some code for it.

https://www.ebay.com/p/22006058790?iid=274115919207

Oddmar wrote:

Ianth3impler wrote: In the mean time I have not found any viable (cheapish) 30 amp forward/reverse RC car brushless ESC’s for this build, so I’m having my Nerd friend Rion design a PCB set up and write some code for it.

https://www.ebay.com/p/22006058790?iid=274115919207

It needs to be forward and reverse.

Took a break last week, had to wait for some parts to come in. Tried to cast the flange a few days ago but ended up running into a time crunch and wasn’t able to pour. I was able to CNC out the viewing port out of .25 inch lexan after a few mistakes. I am currently in the process of making the water tight through hull connections, designing LED fixtures, and the electronics tray. I just knocked out the battery set up last night. Here are some pictures.

New update for today: I cut the aft pressure hull bulkhead out of carbon fiber plate. Still learning tolerance measurements for CNCing, my machines could be a couple of blonde ones off. So when CAD says the hole is going to be 12.67mm the machine gives me 12.44 after the cut. Still a work in progress, so I ordered 13mm drill bits to finish the main bulkhead holes. The bulkhead will be comprised of 3 3D printed parts that just hold the connectors in place to be completely submerged in epoxy hopefully granting complete water tightness.

nice work and progress.

Sorry, apparently that seller put keywords in that messed up my search. I have seen brushless ESC's out there cheap though, just search.

I've just ordered one of these-
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Two-way-Brus ... 2749.l2649

I'm hoping it does what it says.

I'm also looking into flashing a single direction ESC with firmware to make it bidirectional.
Hope that helps you.

fryslan76 wrote:nice work and progress.

Did you ever start again on your ROV? I just looked through your build from 2011.

bigbadbob wrote:I've just ordered one of these-
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Two-way-Brus ... 2749.l2649

I'm hoping it does what it says.

I'm also looking into flashing a single direction ESC with firmware to make it bidirectional.
Hope that helps you.

I ordered BLheli s32 35A drone ESC's. hoping to do the same with reflashing to make it bidirectional, I'll try to get that done this weekend. I've been following your new posts, and I'm hoping more people get involved in building ROVs this year. I see a lot of old information on here and would love to see new peoples builds. I would like to point out the tiny drone ESCs are some kind of black magic, I did some tests a few months ago with one of my large quadcopter set ups. I spun a 16 inch prop on a 380kv motor with a 4S lipo balls to the wall full tilt for 10 minutes and the tiny 40 amp ESC I had hooked up wasn't even hot!