History

 

It's finally come together. The fruit of the past 8 months labor in the form of an orange and black underwater contraption, the Nemo ROV. We've made history by being the first MATE team from High Tech to not have ANY waterproofing issues with a bottomside electronics design, and now we actually have 5 weeks to practice and hone our strategy for the mission tasks. The claw's working great, movement is mostly okay (need to fine tune the strafing movements), and I can actually grab things with the ROV. The alumni are shocked that we actually got the ROV functionality done before the week of the competition I'll probably make a promotional video some time or later because it looks super cool underwater.

We're still far from done though. We still need another end effector to make my job easier (as pilot) to carry the power connector for Task 1, a 2nd camera to be sufficiently waterproofed and mounted, and our simulated ocean bottom seismometer REALLY needs to be worked on. It looks like this:

I have to wake up at 9 AM tomorrow to practice/test the ROV until 5 PM, so I'm going to end the blog post here; my next or the blog post after that will cover everything that happens at the MATE ROV 2018 Pennsylvania Regional Competition, so stay tuned :)

Hacking a Topside Control Box

                                          

Underwater ROV systems often have a "topside control box", a box with electronics to control the electronics on "bottomside". Pictured above is the topside control box of our over from the summer. For our MATE competition ROV however, we needed to upgrade our topside control box. Other teams usually feature expensive and bulky Pelican cases, adorned with shiny 12" monitor screens. But of course, no one has $300 to drop on an expensive branded Pelican case, and neither do I.

                                                         
So this here is a dusty plastic case for my dad's label maker. It's not that great in terms of spacing, but it is definitely sufficient for a couple of electronics components (watt meter, kill switch, USB breakout, HDMI cable). I basically borrowed (stole) this, dremelled some holes, and voila - a control box.

Next was the built-in monitor. Again, being the cheap person as I am, I decided to hack a built-in monitor from an old laptop to serve as a display for the Raspberry Pi 3 microprocessor.

A laptop, as any other.

Slowly getting taken apart - those rubber-like things around your laptop monitor frame cover screws!

A side view of the laptop getting even more rekt.

            

                       The LCD screen is coming out!                                      Success!

Next to connect the controller board - I bought mine off of Ebay. For more details on how to connect the dead monitor to the board, here's the Instructable that I followed:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Turn-a-dead-laptop-into-a-monitor-with-Plexiglas-s/ 

                  

                                       Very nice.                                                      Amazing.

       

Final product!!!

Overall, a pretty cool and fun thing to do, and it only cost me $20! 10/10 would recommend.