Here’s a old video from last summer since I haven’t been out recently. A big reason is that there’s still a bunch of snow on the ground from a few weeks ago. These 2 dives were right before I got my sidescan sonar. We were looking for the Idaho shipwreck that I explored in this post:
I was driving around hoping the the Ping 360 would find the shipwreck. We knew that it was rumored to be in the area, but didn’t know where. This is a good example of the value of a sidescan sonar since I spent an hour looking and didn’t find it, but it instantly slowed up on the sidescan on our first pass around the bay.
Highlights:
0:00 start
1:03 Dive 1 Arrive at bottom
3:49 Dive 1 Deadhead
7:23 Dive 1 Lots of Little Fish
14:01 Dive 1 More Little Fish
17:39 Dive 1 Back at Boat
18:12 Dive 2 Start of Dive 2
20:08 Dive 2 Arrive at Bottom
21:46 Dive 2 More Little Fish
25:08 Dive 2 Fish
35:16 Dive 2 More Little Fish
37:23 Dive 2 Weird Object, Looks like a ship rudder
39:30 Dive 2 Wagon Axle
43:59 Dive 2 Concrete Weight
45:27 Dive 2 Another Weight
46:00 Dive 2 Dead Fish?
52:35 Dive 2 Ending Dive
I also have a short-range Ping360 demonstration video in low visibility that I might upload soon just so that there’s some posts on this forum other than the non-stop software questions and product support. It’s great that this a helpful community, but I also think it gets fatiguing to check in every day and see that almost all of the new posts are just people asking for help, and new videos are rarely added.
Also, I got the new Fathom Spool guard. It looks nice, but I can’t install it now since one of the little M3 screws on the spool stripped out. They all were extremely tight and I was sure that another 1 or 2 would strip out too, but I got lucky. At lest I have years of experience removing broken bolts.
Do you know which properties of the sidescan help most with this? I’m curious if it’s primarily the extra range (or some other feature), or if you expect the Ping360 would be similarly effective if you mounted it at an angle (or set a downward vehicle pitch angle), like is discussed in the Bottom Visibility section of our Understanding and Using Scanning Sonars guide.
Thanks for sharing the video. Always interesting to see what’s going on under the water in various places, and fun to see fish and whatever odd objects you happen to come across
From my end, it’s definitely interesting and exciting when people share progress on the projects they’re working on, or dives they’ve piloted, but the support side of things can also be interesting to help people solve issues, and hopefully enable them to do cool projects and dives that they then may choose to share
On the “fatiguing” point, if you’re primarily interested in specific kinds of content you may want to try configuring notifications, which I’ve just added a section about doing in the “How to Use the Forums” post
Cool! As with all protection, hopefully you won’t need it, but it should do a good job of protecting the connector and slip ring if the tether reel does happen to fall over or get tripped on at some point
I believe those are user-installed. Do you think it would help if we change the wording in the relevant section of the spool assembly guide to prevent others from having similar issues in future, or do you expect there’s some other issue with the screws themselves, or something unusual that happened when you installed the slip ring cap flange initially?
My main thoughts are along the lines of over-tightening of the screws or excessive application of thread lock (which we can recommend against), or potentially thermal expansion of the frame increasing friction by causing the inner screws to be under extra load. It may be helpful to undo the middle screws first, before undoing the outer self-tapping ones that go into the frame, although understandably that’s somewhat too late to try once the screw head is already stripped.
For me it’s the large surface area of the bottom covered in a rapid time. It’s covering more area while also doing it faster. The Ping360 seems to have a max range of about 120’ as I slowly cruise around, meanwhile the sidescan can cover up to a 600’ swath while traveling at 3 knots. As I have said, the sidescan found the shipwreck in under 60 seconds and I couldn’t do with the ROV in 1 hour.
To be fair: I had more fun with the ROV looking at the fish and those objects, but it’s not efficient for shipwreck hunting.
I’m sure that it’s interesting to a lot of people, and every new question is a chance to sharpen your skills. I don’t know anything about the software or a lot of the questions so they aren’t relevant to me, but I still read them sometimes to try to learn something. Maybe I phrased my comment a little strongly since it’s just a very minor annoyance to me and I was also justifying why I’m sharing old videos that would be considered ‘boring’ to a lot of people. I wish that the forum was a lot more balanced with people all over the world sharing videos of their dive sites fairly often, but that isn’t happening so I’m trying to be part of the solution by sharing what I can.
I feel a lot better knowing that it’s my own fault. I couldn’t remember if they were pre-installed. I should be able to drill the head of the bolt off (prefer left-hand drill bit), pull the plate off, then grab what’s left of the bolt with locking pliers. The best method would be to weld a nut on top of the stripped bolt, but I can’t do that with all of the plastic and electronics there. I haven’t gotten around to it yet since I have been busy the last few weekends making other videos for my youtube channel.
Makes sense - not too surprising that a longer range and faster scanning ends up covering area faster
Fair enough - I suppose it depends a bit on what’s being looked for and the relevant angles, but in general I would expect a sidescan to be better for rough large-object searches, and something like the Ping360 to be better for local in-the-moment positioning, and maintaining orientation of a small and nimble vehicle.
I can’t speak for others, but I tend to find the videos you post quite interesting, particularly given you frequently put in effort to provide context and annotations that make it easy to understand what’s going on, and provide a sense of the story of the dive, or the place being explored, or both
Fair enough. I expect commercial interests, along with a general lack of time and energy play into that quite heavily. Your efforts to counteract that are certainly appreciated
There’s also something to be said for both community and convenience. If people can come together around sharing dives then more people are likely to share their dives, so your posts in that direction are helpful to maintaining that. Similarly, if sharing dives is made to be easy then it’s less hassle to do so and more likely that it’ll happen.
From our end, we try to encourage a sense of community on this forum, and in our operations and the events we attend, but we’re also hoping to simplify the uploading/sharing of dives as part of our BlueOS developments, both because the convenience can be valuable commercially, and because increasing awareness of the underwater environment speaks directly to our mission of enabling the future of ocean exploration
I would venture to say that half of the people posting on BR never reach the “destination” (taking the completed ROV out in the real world and doing something useful or entertaining with it), their enjoyment is mostly in the “journey”. To them it is all about the doing at the workbench, the challenges of building, and the excitement of a completed project. Testing in the bathtub or pool is a lot of fun and gives a great sense of accomplishment when testing is satisfactorily completed. Putting your new ROV to use in the real world and facing all of the challenges the outside environment brings is another story. Getting good video takes work and learning to edit. Nobody wants to watch a video over three minutes long (90 seconds is even better).
My many ROV videos (60, or so) shot 10-30 miles out in the Atlantic off Jacksonville were greatly satisfying (still are) but quite difficult to do. It takes a lot of effort and strong discipline to shoot good underwater videos in deep water, especially with strong currents and rough, windy surface conditions, that will interest people and hold that interest for more than a few minutes. Frankly, I wouldn’t have done as much shooting as I did if it wasn’t for the payoff of good fishing that immediately followed. My videos had a purpose in wanting to achieve a better understanding of the reef habitat and what fish were currently in the area, and at what depth. I wanted to show fisherman what was down there. Later viewing was, and still is, very enjoyable to me. That purpose gave me the encouragement to keep going. These videos have generated a lot of interest, in that there are over 14,000 views on YouTube. I let a lot of fishermen in the Jacksonville area know they were available, and I had a lot of feedback indicating they were well received.
I also love the journey, and I also get great satisfaction from completing a project. Building a useful ROV for subsurface exploration isn’t easy, especially if you are a scratch builder. But when you complete the project and can show your friends and others in the BR community what you have accomplished through a well edited, and short video, it greatly adds to the enjoyment.
I didn’t mean to ramble, but I want to encourage builders to set a goal of a useful and entertaining destination, by showing off what you have accomplished in the underwater world outside the test pool. I for one will watch them and learn from and applaud you for your work. Just try and stick to 90 seconds max. Learning to edit video is fun and challenging and will add to your project enjoyment. After all, there is a reason for that camera you stuck on the front end.
Not sure I agree with that - it depends on the purpose of the video. While short form content can definitely be more ‘snappy’ and entertaining, and accordingly can reach a wider audience, there are also benefits to longer form content. In particular it can share more about the experience of actually using an ROV to explore or do things, beyond just the highlight reel.
The same applies for things like understanding a sensor. While having docs and a short example of the main functionalities are definitely useful, longer displays of usage ‘in the field’ can give a better sense of robustness over time, and help find rare edge cases that might not be noticed on first pass. In that case the content is a (potentially entertaining) resource.
People who aren’t interested in longer form content can skip through chapters to parts of particular interest, watch at a faster rate, or just not watch it. Others may watch something inattentively, having it ‘in the background’ and tuning in when something seems extra interesting.
Of course not all content should be long, and shorter content is often more accessible and actively engaging, but that doesn’t mean there’s no space for longer content
I agree. Ideal video length does depend on the purpose. However, I still believe in keeping it as short as possible while still meeting the intended purpose. Giving a timeline preview as btrue has done in his videos is certainly a good way to lead the viewer to sections of interest. This video is 20 seconds long: Tiger Shark at BB - YouTube. it was edited down from a 30 minute length. I thought for sure the shark was going to eat my ROV.
@btrue I was wondering if you could contact me. I’m working on a documentary and we’re looking for someone who has dived at Lake Coeur d’Alene to potentially interview.
