I’m looking to build a very basic set up, but would like to avoid repeating mistakes that are already known and would like suggestions on what components to use.
All I want is the ability to see the sea floor at depths between 5 metres and 25 metres.
I am thinking that the simplest solution would be a screen on the boat that can live view the camera feed, and a camera rigged up on the end of its cable to reliably point down, with a wide viewing angle, good lighting, and weighting as necessary.
It would be ideal if this could operate with a high enough frame rate and with enough stability to allow us to move the boat whilst viewing the bottom.
My guess is that we would want to manually hold the camera roughly 5 metres off the bottom and adjust by hand as necessary.
We are looking to identify sea life and possibly salvage as small as a fist.
Any recommendations would be amazing, or would it be easier to just buy a cheap ROV and ignore its movement functions and weight it to do what we need?
I don’t have a specific camera recommendation, but I imagine the most straightforward approach to your proposed requirements would be using some form of IP camera that supports Power-over-Ethernet, and using an ethernet cable as a tether for it, with the camera inside a watertight enclosure, and WetLink Penetrators as relevant.
At the topside you’d then need something to receive the ethernet input and either display the video stream directly (e.g. if it’s a laptop, or a tablet or phone with an ethernet to USB converter), or route it to something that can receive and display the stream (e.g. a router that a display and/or recording device is connected to via wifi). For what it’s worth, wired video receiving tends to be a fair amount more stable, and less prone to jitter and lag.
For lighting I’d recommend our Lumens, which you could either power from the topside (via a separate cable with quite thick conductors), or a battery in the enclosure. If you want control over the brightness then a Thruster Commander could be helpful, or replicating the functionality with your own microcontroller and potentiometer(s).
If your requirements end up changing to further depths than 25m then you may need to start looking into other tether options, because ethernet signals cannot travel indefinitely.
