Discover underwater with this Arduino-controlled DIY ROV

Who doesn’t wish to discover underwater? To take a journey beneath the floor of a lake and even the ocean? However a remotely operated automobile (ROV), which is the sort of robotic you’d use for such an journey, isn’t precisely the sort of factor you’ll discover on the shelf at your native Walmart. You may, nonetheless, comply with this information from Ranuga Amarasinghe to construct your personal ROV for some aquatic enjoyable.

Amarasinghe is a 16-year-old Sri Lankan pupil and that is really the second iteration of his ROV design. As such, he’s dubbed it “ROV2” and it seems to be fairly succesful. All of its electronics sit safely inside a 450mm size of sealed PVC tube. That mounts onto the aluminum extrusion body construction that additionally hosts the six thrusters powered by drone-style brushless DC motors. 

ROV2’s mind is an Arduino Mega 2560 board and it drives the BLDC motors by six digital velocity controllers (ESCs). It receives management instructions from the floor by way of an umbilical. The operator holds a Flysky transmitter that sends radio indicators to a receiver floating on the water. An Arduino UNO Rev3 reads these after which communicates the motor instructions to the Mega by the tethered serial connection. That limits the utmost size of the tether to about 40 meters, which subsequently limits the utmost working depth. 

With the desired lithium battery pack, ROV2 can traverse the depths for 30-45 minutes. And when outfitted with the 720p FPV digicam, pilots can see and document all the underwater motion.