Our Original Watertight Enclosure Designs Are Now Open Source

Blue Robotics Products Watertight Enclosures
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Originally published at: Our Original Watertight Enclosure Designs Are Now Open Source - Blue Robotics

We’re happy to announce that we are making our original watertight enclosure designs fully open source and available for anyone to use or modify. Watertight enclosures are a fundamental component needed in all sorts of subsea applications. We really like our new locking watertight enclosure design, but we realize it won’t work for everyone and we want to give a good starting point for those interested in designing their own enclosures.

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We’re primarily sharing the flange and tube designs here since we no longer make them, but we’ve also included a blank end cap for each size to give you a starting point for any end cap you’d like to make.

The designs are licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, allowing you to copy, redistribute, transform, or build upon the design for commercial and non-commercial purposes, the only term being that you give attribution to Blue Robotics. Basically, do whatever you want and share credit if the files were valuable to you!

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Below are links to the original design files for the 2”, 3”, and 4” enclosures, including the tubes, flanges, and end caps. We originally designed the enclosures to use stock acrylic tubing, which is available from many plastics suppliers. Here’s our recommended source and the particular sizes you’d need from ePlastics, who can even cut them to length for you!

2” Series (WTE2):

WTE2 Flange Seal (IGS, SLDPRT, STEP, STL files, CC BY 4.0 license)

WTE2 12″ Tube (IGS, SLDPRT, STEP, STL files, CC BY 4.0 license)

WTE2 Blank End Cap (IGS, SLDPRT, STEP, STL files, CC BY 4.0 license)

  • Original depth rating of 12″ acrylic tube: 100 meters
  • Use with AS568-030 face seal O-ring and AS568-133 radial seal O-ring
  • See stock material above and adjust to desired length
  • End caps can be machined or laser cut

3” Series (WTE3):

WTE3 Flange Seal (IGS, SLDPRT, STEP, STL files, CC BY 4.0 license)

WTE3 8.75″ Tube (IGS, SLDPRT, STEP, STL files, CC BY 4.0 license)

WTE3 12″ Tube (IGS, SLDPRT, STEP, STL files, CC BY 4.0 license)

WTE3 Blank End Cap (IGS, SLDPRT, STEP, STL files, CC BY 4.0 license)

  • Original depth rating of 8.75″ acrylic tube: 150 meters
  • Original depth rating of 12″ acrylic tube: 150 meters
  • Use with AS568-148 face seal and AS568-230 radial seal O-ring
  • See stock material above and adjust to desired length
  • End caps can be machined or laser cut

4” Series (WTE4):

WTE4 Flange Seal (IGS, SLDPRT, STEP, STL files, CC BY 4.0 license)

WTE4 12″ Tube (IGS, SLDPRT, STEP, STL files, CC BY 4.0 license)

WTE4 Blank End Cap (IGS, SLDPRT, STEP, STL files, CC BY 4.0 license)

  • Original depth rating with 12″ acrylic tube: 100 meters
  • Use with AS568-154 face seal O-ring and AS568-238 radial seal O-ring
  • See stock material above and adjust to desired length
  • End caps can be machined or laser cut

As a reminder, these designs are intended to be used with acrylic stock material sizes, and as such, there are some features that we couldn’t include, like a locking cord and machined tube ends. You can get those features with the newer version of our enclosures, but they aren’t necessary for many applications!

We hope this is helpful and that you can get some value from these files! If you have any questions, please direct them to our forums.

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As someone who’s driven by helping others, and a big fan of the efficiencies and reduced redundant work that comes from sharing knowledge, this is something I’m personally quite excited about :slight_smile:

While public design files and basic technical details were also available while we we were selling these products, providing our internal design files under an explicitly public license opens up opportunities for hobbyists and commercial users alike to create custom enclosure designs that can start from a well-tested basis, instead of from scratch. Hopefully that can help with ongoing efforts like this one, and any others to come.

I’ve said before that

While our continuous developments definitely contribute to our mission, it’s also important not to waste the design and evaluation efforts that have already been made (which is part of the idea behind the Technical Reference - I’ll be adding these files there soon). Opening up these designs is one more way of bringing the community with us on our journey, and allows us to share knowledge instead of losing it, or hiding it away in an archive :slight_smile:

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Hello, if we make a custom length, do you have a way of estimating the depth it could reach ? I am interested on 700 mm tubes on 4"