I've just posted a new update to my blog, I'm averaging about 1 update every six months at the moment

http://martin-wareham.blogspot.co.uk/

Slow but sure

Martin

New post; motor shaft extension.

http://martin-wareham.blogspot.co.uk/

Martin

Looks great, maybe a cone over the shaft extension to improve flow even further.

Your going to need a bigger tank

Cheers
Nick

Thanks Nick, I think you might be right, I'm banned from the bath though currently, after a small tantalum capacitor explosion

Martin

It's starting to look a bit like a real ROV thruster now ..... sort of

24VDC, 80 watt brushless DC motor and controller built into the unit. My intention is to oil fill on my ROV and pressure compensate so there are no problems with depth. So far about 750g of thrust in quite a small tank so I would probably expect about 1kg in a real situation.

My intention is to make a vectored ROV with two vertical thrusters so I'm looking at ways of making the parts for all the thrusters as economically as possible (I already have the motors), aswell as the main control PCB and control box, again oil filled and also the frame/buoyancy.

Still lots to do but I thnk the hardest part on an ROV is the thruster design, we'll see ........

Martin

1kg of thrust!

http://martin-wareham.blogspot.co.uk/

With a vectored horizontal arrangement (i.e. four thrusters in a diamond shape) and a bit better water flow in a larger mass of water we should be talking about 4kgs of thrust at all four points, fwd, aft, port, stbd, I would hope

Martin

Hi Martin.
NICE work..
Well done and thanks for shareing with us.
Keep the Blog going.
Regards Antony.

Thank you Anthony,

I've now got to decide how I intend controlling the thrusters, turn on lights, cameras etc.

My inital thoughts are a USB gamepad into a small PC, maybe an SBC, Atom type board with a simple GUI (all at the surface), then an RS485 link to the ROV. I have been thinking about possibly using one of those Raspberry PI boards at the surface too as I'm into my retro computing, specifically BBC Micros, or maybe even a BBC micro 8 bit computers still rock

On the ROV there'll then be an oil filled box with a compliant lid (which can be used as a basic compensator) and a pressure tolerant PCB, taking the comms from the surface and distributing it to the thrusters etc on either an analogue output (maybe PWM into a capacitor .... but SPI or I2C DACs aren't that expensive these days) for speed, and a digital control for direction, or maybe just mutliple TTL RS232 links to each thruster.

Lots to think about and do .... time will tell I suppose.

Oh and six sets of thruster components to make and assemble, as well as decide how I'm gonna do the lights and camera and frame and buoyancy and tether

Martin

Final post of 2012, slow but sure progress, I am a tortoise

http://martin-wareham.blogspot.co.uk/

Martin