[Daniel] sent us over to the blog for the Naval Academy’s Autonomous underwater vehicle entry for the AUVSI competition. You can follow along as they design, build, and test this years entry. It really looks like it would be fun to be the guy who gets to swim with them, like in the latest post in their blog. Their entry, named “Awkward turtle” can be seen above in orange, pictured with their 5th place winning previous entry.

[SpaceShipOne] has built this very nice looking under water ROV.  It is still a work in progress, but nearly complete.  This ROV is a fairly simple construction. most of the body parts are held together using zip ties.  There’s no microcontroller and no custom boards.  He’s using a radio control transceiver that was intended for airplanes to control some standard speed controllers and servos.  For thrust, he pulled the motors out of some bilge pumps and fitted them with propellers.  He’s only tested it once, but promises videos from the lake soon.  He mentions [Jason Rollette] several times since [Jason] has done both simple and complex designs in the past.

Here’s an interesting grabber hand built for use on an ROV. This grabber is a novel use of a very common and extremely cheap electric screwdriver, that is probably found in everyone’s toolbox. It is also a great way to reuse that small electric screwdriver you have kicking around that uses proprietary batteries that are not worth replacing. Many of the ROV’s covered previously could benefit from such a powerful device built from very common materials off his parts list. Because the screwdriver was extremely cheap the designer chose not to completely seal the housing.

It seems like this simple design that could be used in many robotic projects and by simply changing the jaws could yield other creative uses. The first thing that comes to mind is to upsize this hack into something bigger and stronger. Either way, you might not want to get your fingers in there.

Underwater cameras can produce some amazing photography, but who wants to pay for housing if you can make something yourself?

This underwater camera housing on Instructables doesn’t require a specific container, allowing you to choose anything you have around the house that’s watertight and large enough to fit your camera. A finger from a glove is added so you can still operated the controls. A similar project uses an insulated water jug, accommodating any camera that fits inside. Neither of these involve any camera mods.

Read the rest of this entry »