January Blog

Following our findings during the pool tests last month, we worked on both transitioning to buoyancy foam and creating a new plate to hold the final set of electronics. 

We switched to buoyancy foam, which we found didn’t absorb water by submerging a piece overnight and comparing the new weight against the dry weight. We used a hot wire cutter to slice through the foam to create our pieces since the original block of foam is too thick to cut with scissors. The pieces themselves were also cut slightly larger than the calculated amount so that in case the math was wrong, we could cut them smaller instead of having to cut entirely new floats. 

Additionally, we made further adjustments to the side plates to support the thrusters better. We also plan to make sure all of our metal parts are corrosion resistant (especially in salt water), since it is more difficult to remove the oxidized nuts and screws.

We also began assembling the second electronics plate, which is made out of acrylic instead of wood. Most of the electronics would remain the same except for a larger battery and a switch so that we don’t have to plug in the battery every time we want to power the ROV. For this version, we plan to connect the thrusters directly onto the ESCs instead of using connection clips. 

Finally, the issue regarding the ROV tipping and the bad tether connection has been solved. After a lot of research and testing, we found that the culprit for the bad video quality wasn’t the tether but actually the Fathom Interface box, or specifically the ethernet and power cable converter for the USB. Once we replaced our previous arrangement without the converter, the video ran smoothly even on the 200m cable at 1080p and 30fps. For the ROV tipping in the pool, we were having problems with Depth Hold mode not controlling the ROV as designed, and instead kept on either driving it to the surface or the bottom of the pool at full speed. After some research we found that this problem was largely solved in 2.0.0, even if it was still a beta version.