Hello, I am working for the underwater slam, and I want to use OAK camera in this project. And I am not sure that whether the OAK-D-Lite can be installed inside the blue rov directly. Although nowadays there are IP67 OAK camera, they still can not work for long time.
Hi @qimg -
I’ve fit an oak lite into the end of a 4” (dedicated) enclosure with this mount before.
It may work in a standard BlueROV2, but you would need to remove he standard camera, and potentially change the standoff height at the back of the ROV. I also had to use 90 degree USB-C connector at the camera side. (Onshape / STEP:
cameras and mounts - Oak Camera Mount.step (82.3 KB)
)
We’re working on launching the C3 IP camera OAK in external housing on the Blue Robotics Reef from MarineSitu.
There is also an oak visual odometry BlueOS extension, it is currently still in development and should be considered an alpha version. The oak extension for streaming the camera’s output to Cockpit works well!
wow, it sounds great! I would like to try this method. And I also found something interesting on Alibaba website, someone is selling universe underwater boxes for camera. Maybe it is convinient for installing different oak or zed cameras.
Hi @qimg
Cool!
That link doesn’t work for me… and that design seems a touch sketchy looking from the picture. Do they provide a depth rating? It looks like a compression gasket seal with many bolts, not a “proper” o-ring- this may mean it can only go down a few meters without leaking, but I’d love to be proven wrong. Do they list a price?
They told me the depth rating is about 20m, and the price is about 100 dollars. This factory is selling these products to universities.
We’ve also designed a prototpye to fit a USB OAK on the front of the main housing (shown here without the acrylic faceplate).
It worked well, though not being able to tilt the camera (either powered or even manually depending on the mission) proved to be a big limitation.
As an unrelated note, we had a lot of problems with USB dropouts when the ROV was in the (salt)water. I think it was an issue with grounding the OAK case, but we never investigated fully. Another reason we didn’t go forward with it.
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As a side note, if you use a Zed you will also need to co-locate an NVidia Jetson board, or use something like the Zed Head, which is a big step up in terms of complexity. Though, in exchange you do get the computational power of the Jetson on the ROV.
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This looks perfect! How can I get this item or its design file?
Let me check if the design files can be released publicly. Ours was machined from aluminum though for shallow water used you may be able to make it out of a plastic.