So one day a while back I watched the movie “Spare Parts”. It was about a group of high school kids who built an ROV for competition and beat MIT. After seeing this movie, I thought that it would be fun to build my own ROV, so I searched online and found the MIT SeaPerch. This was a cheap beginner level ROV to build, but you really couldn’t explore anywhere with it. I needed to build something better. I then stumbled upon BlueRobotics. Then after some research I decided to build a ROV using a BlueRobotics Enclosure and a Raspberry pi as the brain for shipwreck hunting in the great lakes. I have decided to code and build everything (excluding the enclosure) myself. I am going to use a fathom s board to communicate over serial and to send video across a 200m cat5 cable. I am planning on having a three fingered manipulator for item recovery and a GPS buoy ( I will explain later.) if it works. I will be using 4 DIY thrusters, 2 for forward/turning, 1 for vertical and 1 for horisontal. I will use a Raspberry Pi camera ( or something like it) for live feed and a gopro for recording. I will post more as I progress through the project further.
GPS Buoy Idea:
So basically I am going to have a buoy attached to my ROV that has a GPS on it. This buoy will be able to be retracted if needed. The GPS will send coordinates over cable to the ROV to pinpoint the ROV’s position. Then when I have the position I will record it to remember where whatever the ROV was looking at was. I would us the UGPS Blue Robotics sells, but it is way to expensive for my needs. What are some flaws I may have overlooked for this idea?