I am excited to announce that today our customized BlueROV2 Heavy has been continuously deployed for a full year! Everything on the ROV continues to work great. People from all over the world have had the opportunity to remote control this ROV that is deployed to 900m in the Monterey Bay. Some of the components, including the aluminum enclosures, have been used on all previous deployments which have a combined submerged duration of about 2 years. I remember being warned by marine experts that they didn’t expect those enclosures to last more than 6 months.
I just want to give a shout out to Rusty (@rjehangir) and the entire Blue Robotics team on making excellent and affordable products as well as for the advice and assistance on this project. Thank You!
Here’s a link to our YouTube playlist that shows some of the interesting marine life we have seen down there over the past year: Ocean Discovery Monterey Bay - YouTube
Congrats Are those lumen subsea lights? if so are they the old Potted version or the new wetlink version?
I watching your threads and threads about Tahoe I started down the path building a 900m capable blue but where I am now I find if I want sonar of any kind that is under 20-30k my depth is pulled back up to only 300m.
Hi Fred, those are BR lumen lights. We are using the wetlink version. A previous deployment of about 7 months used the potted version and worked but the potting will eventually dry out and crack which we found out during a tank test before a deployment and had to scramble to get replacements The old potted penetrators for the motors however did not hold up to testing and so we installed installed Subconn connectors for everything going into an enclosure.
Well if you ever come across a 1000m depth rated sonar that is less than $20k I would be interested as well.
Hi @spotxuv
We do have zincs on the ROV and the platform that the ROv is connected to. I have not noticed as much degradation of the zincs on the ROV as the platform. After previous deployments the only wear to the enclosures was a little white buildup around the tapped holes and the enclosure annodizing color changed from black to a dark greenish color.
@hube268 - this is so awesome! And something to be really proud of. I know it took a lot of effort and multiple attempts to get to the point where it’s working this well.
Thanks for sharing and letting us be part of the journey!
Well I guess I jinx it because the ROV stopped communicating four days after our one year anniversary. The cause is not easy to diagnose remotely, but from what we can tell, it seems that the Raspberry Pi either died or is not fully booting up possibly due to a corrupted/broken SD card.
Lasting over a year continuously submerged far exceeded all expectations and I’m sure has set many records for both a BlueROV specifically as well as ROV’s in general. A big shout out to Rusty and the Blue Robotics team for making excellent products that just continue to improve.
Hey Kurt, Yes. We actually were planning to redeploy last week but our ride fell through. The failure ended up being a simple fix. Just a loose connection in the battery balancer cable. The hybrid charger board we are using is a one-of-a-kind prototype BR produced as a potential new product that ended up being cancelled. It was definitely not designed for this application and has some annoying things like not working if the battery thermistor or balancing cable is not plugged in. Beggers can’t be choosers though!
The biggest challenge was that I had to redesign and scale down the overall platform and rebuild it all within a month which we were able to do. We’ll hopefully have another redeployment date in October but not guaranteed. Here are a few pictures of the revised platform during setup and assembly
Hi Stephen! Thanks for your reply! That’s very exciting to hear and thanks for sharing the failure information! I’d love to stay in touch and be involved with the relaunch in any way possible. Let me know if we can help in any way.
