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.