ROV progress

So I've had some few questions lately as to the demise of my ROV Submarine I was building last year. I began this project August 2006 and pretty much stopped working on it when I went to Pakistan/Afghanistan in October, when I got back we had the twins almost immediately and then we got a little busy. So, after the move to Uruguay this August life has slowed down again finally and I've broken out the ol' project and have made quite a bit of progress in the last two months.

First I designed an H-bridge and have just completed soldering three of them to control the three thrusters. I am definitely not an engineer and these are the first PCB's I have designed and built myself, so don't scrutinize them too close... important thing is that they actually work.

H-Bridge before soldering

Completed H-Bridge

For thrusters I purchased three 750gpm bilge pump cartridges, this might be a little underpowered so I have left room to add two more or upgrade to 1000gpm cartridges. I don't have them yet though because the company I purchased them from would not ship to an APO, so I will pick them up in Texas in two weeks.

For control I purchased a premade microcontroller board because I want to control the ROV via an ethernet connection, and being a two-bit hack with no engineering ability I wasn't sure I could design, build, and program what I needed. I have since learned enough to build one from scratch, so maybe the next project. I also bought a ready made ADC board to read all the sensors since it was cheap and was made to go with the Microcontroller I purchased.

Microcontroller on left, ADC on right, and breadboard for demo-ing sensors while I am working on the programming in the middle

Finally, this will all be housed in sewer PVC. There are several reasons for this choice, the primary being that it is pressure rated to 300 psi, which means technically the hull would be able to withstand pressure up to 641 feet deep (14.7 psi +(641ft x 0.445 psi)= 300 psi) but I'm just hoping for about 300 feet deep at this point. The other reason is I don't have to try and manufacture any special materials for the sub which is both expensive and time consuming. So the resultant shape is going to be something shaped similar to the Star Trek Enterprise. Right now all I have assembled is the camera housing.

So now I am working on finishing the design of the power supply and the housing, beginning the programming, and a little more research on adding the camera to the data stream being sent back to the control computer via the umbilical cord. I plan to do the first test run in my swimming pool in February.