Remember that pool is going to be fresh water so your results will be a little different for sea water but it is going to be interesting to see what you come up with.
Most of the early dives I’ll be able to get to are going to be freshwater. I don’t own a boat yet, so getting out far enough from the beach to make launching safe is going to take some doing. It should be a little more buoyant in seawater though, so I can add mass as needed.
Just a quick update. The frame is painted now. Still waiting on the last Thruster, but it has a mounting structure inside for whenever it arives. Everything is really solid now that it is all together though. It’s getting there!
Tim,
Looking good.
I’m curious about the arm with the servos in front. Do you have any plans to make that waterproof?
-Rusty
The current plan is to pot the control boards of the three servos in epoxy, fill the body with marine grease, stick a bunch of O-rings on the shaft and hope for the best. I may swap them out for a pre-waterproofed servo at some point, but for right now they are mainly a placeholder and units to test the I2C adaptor for the openrov board to make sure I can actually control all three of them at once. Depending on how the initial tests go, I may end up printing a better robot arm mini pressure hull of some sort.
Any updates on this kit? really cool.
Lets see, I had the hull out in the water for no electronics float and pressure testing, and it worked great. Balance and buoyancy is right where I wanted it at without the batteries and whatnot in it. Now I just have to wire everything. I still need to buy one more through hull fitting, and then get another port or two for a vent plug cut and threaded in the other plate, but it’s definitely nearing operational status. The Electronics all seem to work outside of the ROV, the IMU and OSD are both showing data from the camera and heading, etc. I do think I need to redo the motor mounts that come with the motors with a stronger 3d printed unit, which I’ll post here once it is done. Here are a couple pictures of the float test in one of my co workers end of season slightly greenish pools. Next up will be the function test with all the electronics in it now that I know it isn’t going to sink like a rock.
@Tim, what are the dimensions of your primary pressure housing? Do they fit the 4"x11… standard from Blue Robotics? With your permission, I would like to use your camera mount design on my ROV as I am planning on an identical mounting solution for the primary housing. Do you encapsulate the motor electronics or is that in the rear section housing?
Ah, I see your link at the top of the forum page now, LOL
I see your set up is for the OpenROV kit. Cool. I’m looking to do a hot swap-able kit…with minor changes to blend the two.
Looks like your main housing is a bit large for my system, but nice work.
Thanks!
Yeah, my main housing, and really the whole ROV is somewhat on the larger than necessary scale. I wanted to make the biggest possible ROV that I could make with my TAZ 3d printer, which drove many of the design considerations. As this is an open source project, you are certainly free to use, adapt, modify or otherwise employ any part of that ROV. You can even sell the parts if you want. My goal was to make a largish platform available to universities and smaller research entities that might not otherwise be able to afford something like that, but with enough extra space to fit some serious hardware on there if needed.