I have previously built a multi-environment rover. In this project I will be focussing only on building an underwater rover, using mostly on hand electronics and 3D printing.
I have temporarily put the project on hold after I ended up blowing my ESC when I did a first run of my electronics system. I need to get a new ESC and rewire the electronics and test again. I plan to work on it during late December.
I started with the practical work for the project. I assembled the electronics that I have available and tried to organize them. Since I am going to be putting the motors underwater using a tether, I will need to account for the connectors there as well. I have made a rough electronics design and mechanical structure. The major issue is the microcontroller. Although I have standard Arduinos, I want to use a different controller for this project. I have a Microbit v2 and a Lilypad, which I am inclining towards due to 5V operating voltage. I will need to first try programming the Lilypad and get comfortable with it, which is the first thing I will be doing. Then I will quickly code up parts of the overall rover software, verify and then put them all together.
I previously started this project sometime back and stopped working on it. Now I am trying to speed build a rover in a few weeks. I have quite a lot of electronics and experience from my thesis project. I will be applying some Project Management principles in documentation and updating the logs. I have pretty much all the electronics. Just need to build up the circuit and test out the components out. I want to finish this project soon as well. More coming in next log!
I did some research work. The article I looked through was https://bluerobotics.com/learn/what-is-an-rov/. There are some interesting information there. I then went through OpenROV project. In India, the kit isn't commonly available. So after checking how to DIY, it turns out the BOM and building process is too time-consuming. I will probably be switching to a water-surface ROV. I will start by looking into Ivan Miranda's builds as reference and try to 3D print the same.