Hey all, I’m looking to build a camera/light setup that can be ran over a cable on my diving umbilical. Please see below photo, the top left cable (orange coating) is all wiring dedicated to Camera & Light.
I would also like to build a topside unit that could receive the camera feed, record the video, send to a display, & as control a dimmer for the LED light.
I currently have the Blue Robotics Low-Light HD USB Camera.
My tether is 100m in length.
I know there are currently products out there to do this, and I do own some of those products. I am just interested in building something myself.
Does anyone have any suggestions about this project and any recommended reading on how to get started?
Hi @Brandon!
If you’d like to use that USB camera, you’ll need to connect it to a small computer like a Raspberry Pi. If you were to flash the SD card of this pi with BlueOS, you would get the video stream and recording software you need with no coding required! It is possible to run BlueOS without the navigator hat, and just use it to manage your video streams.
You’ll only need a single twisted pair to carry the data, you could use the blue and white smaller conductor in that orange wire for this. You’d connect this twisted pair to a Fathom-X tether interface at the subea and surface side, to carry the data for long distances. If you were going a shorter length, you could use two of the twisted pairs for normal ethernet, but this isn’t likely to work well at 100m!
Finally you’ll need power for the camera and Raspberry Pi. You could use the black and red wire for this, since it’s a bit bigger. I’d recommend a surface power supply of 24V DC, as a nice balance between safety and efficiency. You’ll need a DCDC converter on your subsea side to step this down to 5V, although you can (and should) power the Fathom X from it directly. The unit I link there has a USB C output which makes it easy to connect to a Pi 4.
To view the video on the surface, a computer with a web browser is all you need. You can connect to BlueOS, install and open the cockpit extension, and then watch the live video! You can also push record. You could also use QGround Control for this as well. You’ll need to configure your topside computer to have a static IP of 192168.2.2 and subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 in order to interface with the default network configuration of BlueOS but you can adjust this after the initial connection.
I hope that provides enough to get started, or at least consider that particular method of solving your problem!
