Homebuilt ROVs Forum

So here's video of my last attempt out at the lake, made it to 120ft and had a few issues. Luckily, all of them are easily correctable and the important parts worked great. RF transmission, bilge pump motors, and camera and main housings survived. The first problem I had was flooding of the PVC hull around 60ft. My design of the hull at the time was PVC with one section sealed and one vented. Well, the seal leaked and the buoyant part flooded. That left it basically anchored and unable to move on it's own. Second problem (and I saw this one coming), my lamp housing flooded which knocked out my LED lamp.
Since this dive I've reworked the PVC hull (totally separate sections this time), and I'm going to fill the lamp housing with white oil or mineral oil. Found a few industrial white oils like Marcol 82 and 3M's Fluorinert online, but they're pricey and for the lamp, I think a paraffinic white oil like drug store mineral oil will be fine.
The video seems like a series of failures, but overall it went really well and I'm excited to try again. It was fun watching the ROV diving into the abyss on the computer screen and then in the darkness, the bottom of the lake appeared.

Davy Jones' Locker be damned!

Very Nice! I'd like to go that deep, but I made the unfourtunate design decision of only putting 40 ft of tether on my ROV. Oh well, there's always rev 2.0