I am going to design and build my own ROV. I like the control concept of OpenROV and will likely use that, but I don’t like their mechanical structure at all. I’m thinking more like the shape of Sea Perch, although a bit bigger to accommodate the t100.
For depth control I want to consider a ballast tank Idea, using a servo to pull a piston in and out of a cylinder connected to the sea water. I only want to go down maybe 30ft, 50 absolute max. It seems that a ballast tank ought to be more stable than running a vertical thruster.
Is this forum intended to get into ROV design, or are there better forums for that? any links?
Sounds like you have a great idea there. You’re the second person who has asked about where to put comments like this. We would love to encourage this kind of discussion and hear what people our doing with their T100s so to prevent confusion we have created a separate build forum just for that! So feel free to continue your build documentation over there.
I have a question about the BlueROV electronics. You said you used the APM autopilot. What mode did you select for the autopilot, or did you design your own firmware?
We used the APM autopilot only for its hardware. We wrote all the software ourselves. We are planning to make the software open-source and available online once we start shipping BlueROVs.
For future reference, you can start a new topic for a question like this, which will help other people find the answer in the future.