3D Printed ROV – Camera
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.
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.