This project originally started out around 2009 as a simple PVC frame type ROV I called the LCUBE, which was an acronym for “Low Cost Underwater Basic Explorer” because it was basically a square design and it was going to be a low cost basic observation type ROV without any no bells or whistles.  I was trying to build this while at the same time trying to write a complete set of detail build plans that I could sell to support my website.

This was as far as I got before I ran into issues with the buoyancy aspects of the project.  I tried using various sizes of PVC floats for buoyancy but could not achieve enough flotation without going to 3″ PVC pipe which would have meant I total redesign of everything at which point it would basically just be a Seafox Rov.  At this point the entire project was shelved and basically most of the work I did writing the plans was pretty much a wasted effort except for the control portion but more on that later…

In 2014 I bought my first 3D printer to support a side business I ran and then eventually I started also using it for all of my hobbies. Circa 2015 – One of the first things I designed was a kort nozzle for the bilge pump thrusted I used on the LCUBE.  These things came out awesome and increased the performance of the thruster by about .8 lbs of thrust.

It was at this point I decided to try and incorporate the kort nozzle right into a complete thruster/mount for the bilge pumps.

Once I had the thruster done I then decided to try and design an entire 3D printed (for the most part) ROV.

This was the main design which I dubbed the “REBOOT” because I was reusing the thrusters and control system from the LCUBE. I tried to keep it a basic square design still and the size was limited to the how big my build plate on the printer was.

There’s more info on the forum post about the initial build process but I’m skipping most of that here because things changed after getting this far.

Rear view. (all of the cracks in the parts are from printing in ABS without an enclosure… I was still new to printing at this point.)

After getting most of the parts of the main frame printed out I was concerned I wouldn’t have enough buoyancy again and not wanting to repeat my LCUBE failure I decided to jump back into the CAD and enlarge the float pod.

Starting from scratch I redesigned the entire ROV with a much larger float pod and even went a bit further into the design at this stage. (Of course if I go with a tube up front for the camera as shown it might be to much buoyancy now.)

With the basics of the overall design complete it was time to reprint all of the parts of the float and frame.

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All Information, Pictures, and Material is copyright © 2022 by Stephen Thone and may not be used for any personal or commercial purposes without the consent of the author. All rights reserved. The Author makes no guarantees or warranties as to the accuracy or completeness of, or results to be obtained from accessing and using the Information herein.

I use what a call the BRCS (Basic Rov Control System) for control of this ROV. (Which was part of the LCUBE.)  It is a pretty basic control system using relays, a few buttons, and an arcade type joystick.  While simple to make it does only allow for simple ON/OFF control of the thrusters. I’ve had a full write up of this system on my other website for years and this is also covered extensively in the “The Basic Rov Control System Wiring Manual” that I wrote while making the LCUBE.  Below is just some quick highlights of the system.

The main control portion of this system consists of a bank of DPDT relays to control forward/reverse of the thrusters as well as options like lights, cameras, or open/close of manipulator functions.

This is the top side wiring diagram of the arcade type joystick.

These are DPDT (Double Pole Double Throw) relays. two of these are wired together to control each thruster.

Once wired together correctly these eight relays will control the three thrusters and either the tilt of the camera (or control of the manipulator.)  I have to pick which function I want before launching.

This is what the completed main control box looks like when fully wired.

I used melted candle wax to seal everything up in the project box.

The sealed box before attaching the lid.

For the top side controller I used an arcade type joystick and buttons, as well as a few other types of connectors.

For the controller box I used the top of a Fishing box. This will allow me to contain a battery in the bottom to make the entire system portable.

The top of the box which will actually be the controller is detachable if I do not need that battery. (say if I’m on my boat, I’ll use the trolling motor battery.)

This is the template for the layout of everything.

The joystick gets mounted diagonally this is a big part of the system so when you press up (forward) two buttons get pressed at once.

Here’s how the control buttons look like when mounted.

These are the power and tether connections.

All wired up ready to go.

The removable power and tether connections for easy break down.

Overall while pretty basic in function it does make for a simple and relatively cheap control system especially for beginners.

 

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All Information, Pictures, and Material is copyright © 2022 by Stephen Thone and may not be used for any personal or commercial purposes without the consent of the author. All rights reserved. The Author makes no guarantees or warranties as to the accuracy or completeness of, or results to be obtained from accessing and using the Information herein.

This is the updated float pod and frame design. The float pod size was doubled and a few other minor changes were made.

The new design is now only two main pieces for easier and faster printing. (cut away shown)

It took a bit of doing but I got both piece of the new float pod printed.

Here are both pieces of the float pod being test fit. I added some small windows to the left half of the float to aid in adding the buoyancy filling.

For buoyancy I am using some old micro balloons I had laying around from my R/C Days and a epoxy like polymer coating. I did some initial testing (which can be seen on the forum) if interested.

I did some volume testing this morning… I filled half the float with water to measure how much it would hold. It’s going to take about 26oz. (volume wise) to fill one half of the float up. If my math is right (and by math I mean my conversion app on my phone) the 1 pint of micro balloons I have is about 18.6 Oz and with whatever epoxy I need to use I should have enough to do at least half of the float. I still don’t have an actual ratio to mix at so as usual I’m just going to wing it and see what happens.

On a side note the print isn’t very water proof as I had some small leaks while filling it up. I only printed it at 80% infill, .30 layer height, 3 Outline shells, and 2 Top and Bottom layers (I think the top most layers on the curved section is where the leaks were.) So sooner or later I will increase these values and print a test piece to see if I can accomplish a print that at least stand up to a bit of pressure. Anyway that’s a test for another day…..

I hope this micro balloons buoyancy stuff works at depth, I all ready have some ideas to make molds for tethers floats using this method.

On to the fun part.  I have all my stuff ready to mix up some poor mans homemade syntactic foam.

The new Micro Balloons I bought seems much finer than the old stuff I had so I decided just to mix it all together before I started to make sure all the buoyancy would be the same. (even though it probably wouldn’t matter but better safe than sorry later on.) This stuff is not fun to work with it floats in the air everywhere. (wear a respirator if you play with this stuff.)

I then measured off enough Micro Balloons (in volume) to fill the entire half of the float. I know I probably shouldn’t do this all at once but what the hell I just want this done at this point.

I think your suppose to mix half the balloons to part A of the epoxy and the other half to Part B and then mix it together but I don’t know how much epoxy to use so I just dumped half the balloons in the mixing bowl and started adding mixed epoxy and more balloons until I got a consistency I liked.

I ended up using all the epoxy I had and almost all the balloons I measured out. I couldn’t use all the balloons because it was getting too thick to pour.

I was a little sloppy but I got most of it in there.

I used my vibratory case cleaner to vibrate out some air bubbles.

I was a little short on filling it up but that gap I need to fill in will hopefully hold the two piece together better when I fill the other half. My biggest concern right now with doing it all at once is the curing epoxy will heat up to much and melt the outer shell.  Now I wait… and see what happens.

Houston we have a problem… I guess it’s a good thing it wouldn’t fit the pressure pot because when I checked on it an hour later I had a little bit of expansion of the front half. (so much for my gap) It seams like the thicker sections are curing faster probably because of the heat build up. The good new is while it was hot from the curing it wasn’t nearly enough to melt anything though.

Thankfully it wasn’t fully cured yet so I was able to salvage everything with a bit of trimming with a razor blade and a hobby saw. A little sanding later and it will be fine, as long as it doesn’t grow any more overnight.

So in theory… I’m covering my windows with packing tape, I’m then going to fill this half with balloons the same way I did on the first half, then superglue the other half on top, and then flip it back over and let the balloons settle to the middle of this half and hopefully join with the other half… This should be fun.

So far everything worked out pretty well. The filling went well and it glue together nicely, I put a bunch of clamps on it just encase things tried to expand it didn’t separate the two halves.

I poured it a little short so hopefully it expands again like last time and it will fill in the rest if not I’ll just top it off later on and then glue the windows shut.

Not Shown- It came out good, I got it topped of and the windows sealed up. This side didn’t blow it’s top so I hope there wasn’t a huge air bubble in the last one.

Next I’m prepping the float for a quick paint job. I gave the float a rough sand, then covered it with spot glazing putty to fill in some of the imperfections of 3D printing and to try and hide the joint, then a bit more sanding. It’s far from perfect but better than nothing I guess.

A few coats of primer and some more sanding and it’s ready for some paint. It looks a lot smoother in the picture than it really is but over all I’m happy with it. I’m going to go with a Florescent green for high visibility.

Here is the finished and painted float pod. It’s hard to get a good picture of the true color and the seam still shows but overall I’m happy with how it came out. I have still yet to test how much buoyancy it will provide (I’m kind of scare to find out at this point) but I’ll get around to it sooner or later.

The frame sides where printed in some cheap Chinese filament which I didn’t properly configure so they came out kind of rough. To get ready for paint I also coated them with spot glazing putty and then sand most of it off to smooth things out. Here you can see one coated and the other sanded they are not perfect but good enough for the prototype.

Here are is the frame assembled and ready for testing.  I was able to reuse the cross brace/vertical thruster mount from the first prototype.

Jumping right into testing at this point.

Well it floats….so that’s a good start and I overcame the major issue with the LCUBE design.

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(2018) – Here is some video of the first control tests… it’s not very exciting but it looks like it going to work out. It’s not balanced correctly yet I still have to add the camera pod and mini manipulator I designed for it right now it’s pushing the nose up.  It actually might be a little to fast for just on/off control though so I might have to add a speed control up top to limit the power to the thruster. I’ll figure that much out when I get to it.

Next it was time to start work on the Camera

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All Information, Pictures, and Material is copyright © 2022 by Stephen Thone and may not be used for any personal or commercial purposes without the consent of the author. All rights reserved. The Author makes no guarantees or warranties as to the accuracy or completeness of, or results to be obtained from accessing and using the Information herein.

This is the camera I bought to test out. Its a PC600XS Day/Night Color Board Camera from Supercircuits. It boasts 700 Lines of Resolution with a 1/3″ 960H Sony ExView Super HAD CCD II imager and a 0.0001 Lux Rating. I’ve only briefly tested it out so I don’t know how well it’s going to work yet. It’s suppose to produce True Color Images but I think it’s only color and then switches to B/W at night so that might be a little disappointing. At $90 it wasn’t overly expensive but still not a cheap as some other small board cameras that are around. Hopefully the low Lux rating is worth it.

I had this 1/8″ thick clear tube laying around for years and while its a little scratched up it should work for a camera tube for now. I need to make some endcaps for it on the lathe but I don’t have any stock to make them from yet so I next I will be designing the camera mount for inside the tube. I think I have a small geared motor somewhere too so the mount might incorporate a tilt mechanism into it too. Back to the CAD…….

This is a quick rendering of the first prototype of my camera pod for the Rov.

This is what I came up with for the inner working of the camera mount. I was able to incorporate a tilt mechanism into it and the pieces will be 3d printed (of course). I designed the mounts base piece so just slides into the camera tube and is just held in place by spring pressure of the base side walls on the camera tube.

The motor I had turns at 58 RPM which is a little to fast for direct drive so I added a few gears to hopefully slow down the tilt rate enough.

The camera wires are all going to run through the center of the pivot tube…

… so to keep the wires from ever being twisted too much if the camera was ever tilted around in one direction to many times I added a stop to the pivot shaft to eliminate that possibility.

There’s no way to put limit switches in here so I used a ball and dent on the shaft to incorporate a clutch like mechanism into the outer gear. When the stop on the pivot shaft hits the ball should just compress the spring and jump to the next dent allowing the motor to keep spinning with out breaking or stripping the gears.

Last but not least and exploded diagram of all the bits and pieces. Time to fire up the printer and see how well I did……….

I printed the base piece first to make sure the motor would fit and the base would fit well enough in the tube.

Everything fit pretty well so far and the spring action walls seem to hold the base in the tube well enough.

The rest of the piece where printed in one go. I printed the camera arm and pivot shaft in two separate pieces to make it easier to print and I will just glue it together later. I also printed an extra gear and e-clip just encase they needed a little fitting.

After a little clean up all the parts ready to be assembled.

Here is the assembled camera mount… so far everything is looking good.

The back side… the e-clip needs to be a bit smaller so it doesn’t hit the motor when the shaft is rotating.

It still rotates a little faster than I would have liked (I’ll have to take some video later) maybe I can slow it down with a resistor. It might need a few adjustments but so far it seems like it should work out. I still need to get some tiny screws to hold the camera to the mount before I can fully test it.

I made a few small design changes today to try an improve things a little. I added a few more dents for the clutch ball on the pivot pin for smoother transitions, added a bit more shaft support to the clutch gear, and the big change I made was to make the drive gear a little smaller so hopefully that will slow the tilt down just a bit.

Here’s a cut away picture just to show how things mesh. Back to the printer for round two…..

Here’s the finished Camera Mount… with the exception of one of the camera screws not lining up (I drilled the holes off I guess the screws are so tiny) everything works great. The tilt speed with the new gears is perfect now and with the added shaft support I added to the clutch gear the gears mesh up perfect too. I’m very happy with how everything came out. I was a little concerned with how small the teeth were and whether or not they were going to print right but everyday this Makergear printer just amazes me.

A not so exciting video of it in action…

First try at o-ring end caps so I’m not sure how I did yet but the first side is done anyway. It was pointed out that the o-rings probably have to much compression. They were right as I can’t even get the end cap off now.  They are silicone O-rings and listed as “Durometer is A70”. At this point as long as it’s sealed I don’t care. I’ll cut the grooves deeper on the next one.

Test fit before turning the next end cap.

I did a much better job this time cutting the channels for the o-rings. I found a guide online and was able to figure out the proper depth they should be this time. They still might not be perfect yet but at least I can remove this end cap unlike the last one. I still have a bit more machining to do to this cap but I’m going to try and get it in the pressure chamber tomorrow and give it a test to see if it’s waterproof before I go any further.

Did one more quick mock up while I was at it to make sure it fits in the frame. So far so good…..

I dug out the old pressure chamber today to test my caps out… unfortunately my PSI gauge was messed up (it reads 20-30 PSI) with no pressure so the 100PSI reading shown here is not correct. I do however have a scuba depth gauge so I threw that in the chamber with the camera housing.

The first tests were a success as there was no water in the housing. The max depth on the gauge showed right around 170′ which should be in the neighborhood of 70-80PSI which is about right for house water pressure. This Rov will never see that depth so I should be good with the seal the o-rings are providing.

Next I have to machine out some recesses on the one end cap and drill some holes for the through connectors for the 5 wires. After that I will have to re-test in back in the chamber before installing the actual camera. Overall things are going well and it feels great to be making progress on this project again.

Back to work on the end cap… I bored out the recesses today to make room for the camera now I just have to drill some holes for the penetrators.

The spring pressure idea of the original camera mount was not going to be secure enough so I had to redesign the main camera mount so it could screw to the end cap. This should keep everything nice and tight and in place.

As a quick side project and basically just out of curiosity to see if 3D printed parts would handle any kind of pressure and actually be waterproof I printed up a endcap to my camera housing to test out in the pressure chamber.

The o-ring seal on the tube looks good but I don’t know how well they will seal against the printed surface if the surfaces of the part will actually stop the water. Even printed at 100% infill with 4 outer shells all around I don’t have high hopes that it will work but its worth a shot just to know once and for all.

After an hour in the chamber… As suspected it didn’t work.  I’m not exactly sure of where it leaked but you can see water and air in between the two o-rings so I’m guessing everywhere.

OK back to the real end cap… I drilled and tapped 5 holes for the 4-40 brass screws I will be using for penetrators. I wrapped the screws with a bite of thread sealing tape before inserting them in the cap.

Here they are on what will be the inside of the tube…

…and here the are on the water side. I planned on secure the wires on this side with nuts but really don’t have the room so I might have to machine other threaded fittings if I want to be able to remove the pod from the Rov.

Wires are soldered to the bolt heads on the inside for the camera and tilt motor. I might just solder the water side wires on too in the long run.  Next it’s back to the chamber for more testing.

Tonight’s test saw the slightest bit of water in the tube. I’m not sure if its from the new penetrators or not so I’ll have to retest it tonight with the tube stuffed with some tissue and paper towels to determine exactly where the leak is coming from. If it is from the penetrators I can just seal them by filling the recess with epoxy if it comes to that.  I’m also testing at a simulated depth of 200′ and this Rov only has a 100′ tether so the working depth is more around the 75′ mark. (which it will probably never see anyway.)

To test where the leak is coming from I stuffed some tissue paper in above the penetrators and then put another piece loose in the housing. What this shows is if the tissue is wet where the penetrators are that’s where the water is coming in and if the loose piece is wet it’s the o-rings.

Well it turns out it is the penetrators. Looking closely I can now see I got them too hot soldering the wires on and you can see they melted into the housing. I’m sure the threads deformed enough to allow water to past through and it just goes to show what pressure can do. I’m sure they would still work at the depths I will be running but I’ll just go ahead and use some epoxy to seal them up so I can move on with the build.

I added some epoxy to reinforce the sealing of the connectors.

On to the wiring… running the wires through the camera shaft was a bit of a pain I should have done this before gluing the camera mount to the shaft. I didn’t have much room to solder on the motor wires either as I couldn’t leave to much slack in the cap.

I was able to squeeze all the wires in there and get the camera mount screwed to the end cap.

Next I cut the plug off the camera cable and spliced it into the wires on the end cap.

So far so good… Next I have to attach the tether wires to the end cap and test the camera feed. I’ll probably have to machine some small screw on fittings to do this as I don’t want to try soldering to the through connectors again.

Next I started to wire the camera to the camera cable in the tether. Originally I just cut the plugs off the camera cable going through the tether (and recently off the camera) figuring I would just solder them back on later and plug all the plugs together. Well I wasn’t sure how the plugs would fare open to the water so I decided to just leave all the plugs off and try to solder the wires from the cable to the through connectors. (plus there there was the fact that I misplaced the plugs that go back on the cable end. ) It took a bit of trial and error with the multimeter to figure out which wire was what. I figured in the camera cable the black and red would be power and the white would be video and the other bare wire was some type of shield…. it turns out that was not the case as I forgot this cable is wired for sound too. The bare wire was the ground (and shield?), the white was the Positive, the black was Video, and the Red was sound. (maybe I’ll go back and add a speaker just for the hell of it.) I also had to splice on a new power connector because the one that came on the camera cable was a size I’ve never seen before.

On the Rov side for now I just soldered on some alligator clips for testing purposes. I used the clips to temporally connect the wires to the through connectors.

I hooked the feed up to my basement TV and holding my breath I plugged in the power adapter… surprisingly enough everything was correct and I have a picture. The image isn’t to bad in color with some lights on but the camera switches to B/W in low light situations and I’m not sure how impressed I am with that quality yet. I’m definitely going to need to add on some flashlights or something.

I almost forgot to drill and tap the camera pod mounting screw location so I took care of that before wiring up the camera.

Next I had to machine up some tiny retainer nuts for the through connectors.

I’m just making my own ring terminals by looping the wire around a larger 6-32″ screw….

… and then hitting it with some solder to reinforce them.

The idea is to simply slip them on the 4-40″ through connectors…

… and secure them with the nuts I machined.

This was a little more tedious then I imaged but I did get them all connected.

Now I just have to splice these wires into the camera cable in the tether, test the camera again, and figure out whats next.

Well I got everything wired up and everything still works… as you can see next is the Manipulator.

 

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All Information, Pictures, and Material is copyright © 2022 by Stephen Thone and may not be used for any personal or commercial purposes without the consent of the author. All rights reserved. The Author makes no guarantees or warranties as to the accuracy or completeness of, or results to be obtained from accessing and using the Information herein.

Even though this was just going to be a small observation ROV I still kind of planned on adding a small manipulator to it anyway. The only problem is I will only be able to control either the manipulator or the tilt for the camera at one time. I’m going to try and make the manipulator easily removable and with modular grippers.

My first thought was to use a scaled down (50%) version of the manipulator a printed before so I printed that first because all the design work was already done. I also wanted to try some other options…

… so there’s this version which I designed based off the gripper I made out of a Radio Shack Armatron that I used on my Seafox because I really like the parallel gripper design better I think.

The gripper design uses a worm gear setup just like the original Armatron. I did add some hooks to the grippers tips to add some versatility so you could close them stick them in a hole and open the gripper to grab the item with the hooks.

The main arm and housing will be made from PVC Pipe and Fittings and use a shaft seal much like my Seafox manipulator. (The shaft is not shown in these diagrams.)

There are quite a bit of bits and pieces to this design because I am incorporating a clutch into the motor. The Original Armatron Gripper had springs on the fingers that wouldn’t let you stall the motor when it was closed all the way, my clutch design will accomplish the same idea. This may limit the gripping force but being as this is such a small Rov I won’t be lifting much anyway.

The clutch is basically just a slip clutch, the triangle surface on the green part mates with a corresponding cut out on the orange part and when the force is to much the entire motor pushes back against the spring and the mate is broken.

This is another view showing the mating surface of the orange part.

The modular part will use easily changeable gripper heads. This one being a golf ball grabber.

This design could be used as a soil or water sampler. These are easy to print so the possibilities are endless.

For the arm portion I started by squaring up the ends of a piece of 3/4″ PVC Pipe.

Next I trim off a small section of a 1/2″ PVC Coupler. (This will be the front section of the main arm housing.)

Then I turn the coupler around in the chuck and chamfer an angle on the front edge. (This is purely for aesthetics.)

Next its on to the seal seat piece. I start by trimming off the flange of a 1/2″ PVC Plug.

I then drill and bore out an area to create the seat for the actual seal.

Turning that part around in the chuck I have to turn it down just a bit so it fits inside the 3/4″ pipe.

These are the machined parts so far.

The seal is pressed into the seat at this point. I’m using a 3/16″ shaft so this is a 5mm Yamaha motorcycle oil seal. (I’ll have to find the part number and update this later.)

Using a PVC primer and glue the seat piece gets glued into the pipe (seal facing out) and then the front section gets glued onto the seat piece. (I couldn’t take pictures while assembling it because I need to stick the pieces together while the glue is fresh.)

This is how the seal should look.

After that the assembled piece goes back in the lathe just to clean them up.

The main housing all cleaned up and I’m ready to work on the internals.

This is an exploded diagram of the Internals.

Colored parts explanation from left to right.

• Purple/Grey part is the seal/seal seat part that was glued into the main arm housing.
• Yellow is a bushing to hold the shaft centered (I didn’t feel a bearing was needed on this one.)
• Orange is the shaft side of the slip coupler.
• Green is the motor side of the coupler.
• Grey is the 10 RPM gear head motor.
• Red is the spring cap (this holds the spring centered and away from the motor terminals.
• Next is the spring.
• Light blue is the internal motor housing.

The internal motor housing (cut away view) is designed around the motor. It has flat internal sides to keep the motor from rotating, a center post for the spring, as well as wire exits.

Here are the actual 3D printed pieces ready to be assembled.

This shows how the spring cap keeps the spring centered and away from the terminals and wires.

The two halves of the slip coupler. The amount of force required for the coupler to slip is depended on the spring used. (I used a ball point pen spring.)

Once everything is assembled in the internal housing the bushing will be glued in place. The bushing slip fits into the seal seat piece when assembled.

The entire internal housing then will slide into the main arm housing and be held in place with a end plug. (not shown yet)

Oops I just noticed I grabbed the wrong motor off my bench while designing this… (too many projects going at once) I grabbed a 10RPM motor instead of a 30RPM. (I think this is a 30rpm anyway. )  At only 10 RPM’s the fingers would take like 1-2 minutes to fully close. The 30 might be a bit too slow too but it’s all I have at the moment so that’s what I’m using. The only problem is it larger so it just barely fits in the main housing so now I have to go back and redo the motor housing. At least everything else should still work.  Well back to the drawing board…..

OK that was easier than I thought… Here’s the redesigned motor mount. It’s no longer a complete internal housing and the flat sections are going to be real thin but I’m still hopeful it will work out.

Everything looks pretty much like it should still fit and work out. I just have to print a the new mount and a new spring cap before I’ll find out for sure.

Here is the other printed gripper. Everything was printed in PLA with the exception of the pads on the fingers. I printed these out of a flexible rubber material so they would have better grip. It uses some 4-40 and 2-56 screws for assembly and a 1/8″ stainless steel rod for the gripper shaft.

The gripper shaft has a flat spot ground in it for the 4-40 set screw on the worm gear.

This smaller shaft of the gripper will mount to the motor shaft though a coupler. This will allow the grippers to be easily changed out when needed.

I next cut a 6″ long piece of 1/2″ PVC pipe to use as the arm of the manipulator. Using the gripper assembly I mark the location of the mounting holes for the gripper. The first mark is for the mounting screw and the second mark will be the access hole for the coupler set screw.

After drilling several holes through the arm on both the top and bottom the arm is glued to the motor housing portion of the manipulator. (some of the holes are for drainage because the arm portion of the manipulator is not water tight.)

A quick test fit of the gripper is next to make sure the set screw access hole is in the correct position.

I am using a piece of 3/16″ stainless steel rod for the motor shaft. Again a flat section is ground into the shaft for the shaft slip clutch coupler set screw.

Next the bushing is placed on the shaft and the shaft is inserted into the housing and through the seal.

I then mark the center location of the set screw in relation to the motor shaft.

I made a coupler out of aluminum to join the smaller gripper shaft to the larger motor shaft. I then mark the location where the motor shaft needs to be cut as well as how far in inserts into the coupler.

After cutting the shaft to size and grinding another flat on that end (not shown) the shaft is reinserted into the motor housing. I temporarily attach the coupler to a scrap piece of the gripper rod so I can insert it into the arm and affix it to the motor shaft.

I secure the set screw in the coupler to the motor shaft through one of the holes in the bottom of the arm.

With the motor shaft and coupler in place I can go back and trim down the gripper shaft to length and grind the set screw flat on the end. (this is done with the shaft removed from the gripper)

Then is just a matter of sliding the gripper in place, securing it with a 4-40 flat head screw, and tighten the gripper shaft to the coupler.

Next it’s on to mounting the motor. I first have to print a new motor slip clutch coupler first as this motor shaft is a different size.

Next is was on to the end cap. This is another 1/2 Plug that is turned down to fit inside the 3/4″ Pipe.

My original idea to keep the motor from rotating was just to use a couple of pins to attach the motor mount right to the end cap so I made a template to dill some holes in the edges of the cap.

This Rov is not going to deep so I just use the epoxy method of sealing the through wires. (I did strip the section of the wires that will be in the epoxy to combat any leaking through the wires jacket if it gets nicked.)

Here the epoxy is setting up. (I finally found a use for the larger manipulator.)

The pin idea ended up looking a little sketchy so I ended up cutting a section out of the end cap and redesigned the mount to have a mating surface so it should be stronger now.

Here’s how the mount and end cap go together.

I cut the wires just long enough to leave room for the motor to slide back and forth a bit. After soldering them on the motor its time to put this thing together.

Here’s the scary part about this… once the end cap is glued on there is no going back. There is no fixing any problems and it’s pretty much a disposable housing if anything goes wrong. (Which is why I didn’t want to risk just using the small pins to keep the motor from rotating.)

Here is the assembled manipulator… as you can see I changed the length of the arm too. When mounted to the Rov it would have stuck out to far and I want to keep the Rov relatively small.

So far everything is working, here is a quick GIF of it in action… It’s still kind if slow (I think a 60RPM motor would be better but I couldn’t find one small enough.) The grip isn’t the strongest either because of the slip clutch but its better than stalling the motor every time it closes to far.

I printed up some different fingers too with optional finger pads. The top fingers (mounted one) have round tip pads while the bottom fingers have pointy tip pads that might grip better. I still need to run some test to see what works better.

Here we have the golf ball grabber. This one actually has a wider opening which I could use the other fingers on if needed.  Next I have to figure out how to mount it to the ROV. I have some different ideas for that too I want to try…

STL files for this design are available on Printables and can be found HERE.

Now it was time to start work on some Lighting.

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All Information, Pictures, and Material is copyright © 2022 by Stephen Thone and may not be used for any personal or commercial purposes without the consent of the author. All rights reserved. The Author makes no guarantees or warranties as to the accuracy or completeness of, or results to be obtained from accessing and using the Information herein.

(June 2022) – After a four year hiatus from this project (life what can I say) it was time to start work on some Lighting.  I am going to try to use these cheap 1100 Lumen Scuba Dive flashlights I found on Amazon.

I started by designing some brackets that will hold some external dive flashlights. These are simple mounts for now just for testing.

The dive light will just be held in place on the bracket with some simple zip ties.

I also designed some clip on shades to hopefully keep the light from scattering to much into the camera view.

Here is the printed bracket and the Dive flashlights.

The dive light bracket just mounts to the same holes that hold the frame to the float pod.

The strap bracket on the light fits into this tab on the bracket to keep it in place.

Two zip ties will then keep everything in place.

The angles will probably eventually change but for now this should work for testing. I still need to print the other side and the shades.

I updated the bracket slightly just to keep the flashlight from spinning while trying to turn the end cap to turn it on.

Here both diver lights have been mounted.

They may be a little to spot lighty (is that a word?) but I’ll have to get it in the water to see how it looks. I may be able to fix this with different lens covers. The angles may need fixing also but I’ll wait till I get it in the water before I change anything.

To be continued soon….

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All Information, Pictures, and Material is copyright © 2022 by Stephen Thone and may not be used for any personal or commercial purposes without the consent of the author. All rights reserved. The Author makes no guarantees or warranties as to the accuracy or completeness of, or results to be obtained from accessing and using the Information herein.