Hacklet 98 – Underwater ROVs

March 5, 2016 by 5 Comments

A few motors, propellers, a camera, maybe a wire tether, and some waterproof electronics. Throw it all together and baby you’ve got an underwater Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) cooking! It all sounds simple on the surface, but underwater ROVs are a tough challenge. We’ve all seen deep-sea ROVs searching the wreck of the Titanic, or working to stop the flow of oil below the Deepwater Horizon. Plenty of hackers, makers, and engineers have been inspired to build their own underwater ROVs. This week on the Hacklet, we’re spotlighting at some of the best ROV projects on Hackaday.io!

borgcubeWe start with [Tim Wilkinson] and BorgCube ROV. [Tim] has jumped into the world of underwater ROVs with both feet. BorgCube is designed to operate in the unforgiving salt waters of the Pacific Ocean. This ROV can see in stereo, as [Tim] plans to use a head mounted VR display like the Oculus Rift to control it. [Tim] wanted to use a Raspberry Pi as the brains of this robot. Since the Pi Compute module can handle two cameras, it was a natural fit. The electronic speed controls are all low-cost Hobby King R/C car units. [Tim] created a custom circuit board to hold all 12 ESCs. This modular design allows individual controllers to be swapped out if one meets an untimely doom. BorgCube is just getting wet, but with 37 project logs and counting, we’re sure [Tim] will keep us posted on all the latest action!

 

lunaNext up is [MrCullDog] with Luna I ROV. Inspired by a professional underwater ROV, [MrCullDog] decided to build a deep diving unmanned vehicle of his very own. Like BorgCube above, many of Luna I’s motors and drive components come from radio controlled hobby electronics. [MrCullDog] is bringing some 3D printed parts into the mix as well. He’s already shown off some incredibly well modeled and printed thruster mounts and ducts. The brains of this robot will be an Arduino. Control is via wired Ethernet tether. [MrCullDog] is just getting started on this project, so click the follow button to see updates in your Hackaday.io Feed.

cavepearlNext up is [Edward Mallon] with The Cave Pearl Project. Not every underwater system needs motors – or even a human watching over it. The Cave Pearl Project is a series of long duration underwater data loggers which measure sea conditions like temperature and water flow. [Edward’s] goal is to have a device which can run for a year on just three AA batteries. An Arduino Pro Mini captures data from the sensors, time stamps it, and stores it to a micro SD card. If the PVC pipe enclosure keeps everything dry, the data will be waiting for [Edward] to collect months later. [Edward] isn’t just testing in a swimming pool, he’s been refining his designs in open water for a couple of years now.

 

If you want to see more under (and above) water projects, check out our updated waterborne projects list! If I missed your project, don’t be shy! Just drop me a message on Hackaday.io. That’s it for this week’s Hacklet. As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of Hackaday.io!

Underwater Laser, Just Add Shark

October 12, 2009 by 30 Comments

underwater-laser-beam

[iskor12] put together a blu-ray laser that is waterproof and packs quite a punch. At 182 mW there is enough power here to pop dark colored balloons (see the video after the break). To make this happen, he found an LED flashlight that has rubber o-rings for waterproofing. Although small, there is enough space in the case to house the battery, driver, and laser diode. A thick ring of aluminum is placed around the laser diode to act as heat sink.

We’ll admit, we don’t know that much about lasers. This is probably the wrong question to ask, but now that he has this what do you do with it? Leave us a comment about your plans for this diabolical creation.

Continue reading “Underwater Laser, Just Add Shark” →

Hackaday Prize: 20 Projects That Make Us All Citizen Scientists

July 18, 2016 by 8 Comments

We live in a time of unparalleled access to technology and this has the power to make life better for everyone. Today we are excited to announce twenty spectacular builds that use access to technology to move scientific exploration within the reach of all. These are the winners of the Citizen Scientist challenge of the 2016 Hackaday Prize. Themes tackled in this round include blood glucose monitoring, insole sensing for analyzing your footfalls, lab equipment like automated microscopy, sensors to measure the world around us, and more.

The winners for the Citizen Scientist portion of the Hackaday Prize are, in no particular order:

 

The Hackaday Prize is the greatest hardware competition on earth. We want to see the next great Open Hardware project benefit everyone. We’re working toward that by recognizing people who build, make, and design the coolest and most useful devices around.

These twenty projects just won $1000 and will now move on to the final phase of The Hackaday Prize, to be judged by our fourteen celebrity judges. Awesome! Now get to work: there’s a lot the hackers behind these projects need to do before the final judging in October where they’ll compete for the grand prize of $150,000 and four other top prizes.

AutomationIf your project didn’t make the cut, there’s still an opportunity for you to build the next great piece of hardware for The Hackaday Prize. The Automation Challenge is currently under way. It encourages everyone to build devices that make your life easier.

Automate your life; build a device that makes your breakfast, a robot to mow your lawn, or software that does your taxes. Build a device that automatically tracks laundry detergent, automates washing the dishes, or a robot that obeys every command.

Like the Design Your Concept, Anything Goes, and Citizen Science rounds of The Hackaday Prize, the top twenty projects will each win $1000, and move on to the Hackaday Prize finals for a chance to win $150,000 and a residency at the Supplyframe DesignLab in Pasadena.

If you don’t have a project up on Hackaday.io, you can start one right now and submit it to The Hackaday Prize. If you’re already working on the next great piece of hardware design, add it to the Automation challenge using the dropdown menu on the sidebar of your project page.

The HackadayPrize2016 is Sponsored by:
Styrofoam watercraft, PCB hydrofoil

A PCB Can Be A Hydrofoil, If It Really Wants To

November 23, 2025 by 10 Comments

You know those old cliche that the younger generations have begun to cynically despise: “follow your dreams!” “You can be anything you put your mind to!” — well, perhaps they are true on occasion. For instance when [rctestflight] had PCBs that dreamed of becoming a hydrofoil, he found a way to make that dream come true.

It’s kind of obvious in retrospect: printed circuit boards are made of FR4, which is a form of fiberglass, and you know what else is commonly made of fiberglass? Boats. So yes, the material is suited for this task. The fact that solder joints hold up to use in a little remote-control hydrofoil is less obvious, but good to know. It certainly makes for easier assembly for those of us who have developed an allergy to epoxy.

Ease of assembly wasn’t really the point here: the point was that by making the “mast” of the hydrofoil out of PCB– that’s the part that holds the underwater wing– [rctestflight] figured he could (shock!) print a circuit onto it. Specifically, a liquid-level sensor, and because microcontrollers are so cheap these days he went the “total overkill” route of embedding an ESP32 on each mast. He started with a resistive sensor, but since those self-corrode too quickly, the team switched to a capacitive sensor that doesn’t need to form a galvanic cell in salt water. Come to think of it, that might still be a problem with the solder joint between the PCBs. Good thing nobody will be riding this one.

Having such a sensor and brain close-coupled allows for a faster control loop than the sonar [rctestflight] had previously been using to control his hydrofoil’s altitude.. Pivoting each mast with its own servo made for a smooth flight over the water— well, once they got the PID tuning set, anyway. Check it out in the video embedded below.

We’ve seen PCB used for enclosures before, and even the chassis of a rover, but using it for a hydrofoil is a new hack. Continue reading “A PCB Can Be A Hydrofoil, If It Really Wants To” →

The Time Of Year For Things That Go Bump In The Night

October 30, 2025 by 23 Comments

Each year around the end of October we feature plenty of Halloween-related projects, usually involving plastic skeletons and LED lights, or other fun tech for decorations to amuse kids. It’s a highly commercialised festival of pretend horrors which our society is content to wallow in, but beyond the plastic ghosts and skeletons there’s both a history and a subculture of the supernatural and the paranormal which has its own technological quirks. We’re strictly in the realm of the science here at Hackaday so we’re not going to take you ghost hunting, but there’s still an interesting journey to be made through it all.

Today: Fun For Kids. Back Then: Serious Business

A marble carved skull on a 17th century monument in the church of st. Mary & st. Edburga, Stratton Audley, Oxfordshire.
English churches abound with marble-carved symbols of death.

Halloween as we know it has its roots in All Hallows Eve, or the day before the remembrance festivals of All Saint’s Day and All Soul’s Day in European Christianity. Though it has adopted a Christian dressing, its many trappings are thought to have their origin in pagan traditions such as for those of us where this is being written, the Gaelic Samhain (pronounced something like “sow-ain”). The boundary between living and dead was thought to be particularly porous at this time of year, hence all the ghosts and other trappings of the season you’ll see today.

Growing up in a small English village as I did, is to be surrounded by the remnants of ancient belief. They survive from an earlier time hundreds of years ago when they were seen as very real indeed, as playground rhymes at the village school or hushed superstitions such as that it would be bad luck to walk around the churchyard in an anticlockwise manner.

As a small child they formed part of the thrills and mild terrors of discovering the world around me, but of course decades later when it was my job to mow the grass and trim the overhanging branches in the same churchyard it mattered little which direction I piloted the Billy Goat. I was definitely surrounded by the mortal remains of a millennium’s worth of my neighbours, but I never had any feeling that they were anything but at peace. Continue reading “The Time Of Year For Things That Go Bump In The Night” →

Ore Formation: Return Of The Revenge Of The Fluids

October 21, 2025 by 16 Comments

In the last edition of our ongoing series on how planets get ore– those wonderful rocks rich in industrial minerals worth mining– we started talking about hydrothermal fluid deposits. Hydrothermal fluid is the very hot, very salty, very corrosive water that sweats out of magma as it cools underground and under pressure.

We learned that if the fluid stays in the magma chamber and encourages the growth of large crystals there, we call that a pegmatite deposit. If it escapes following cracks in the surface rock, it creates the characteristic veins of an orogenic deposit. What if the fluid gets out of the magma chamber, but doesn’t find any cracks?

Perhaps the surrounding rock is slightly permeable to water, and the hydrothermal fluid can force its way through, eating away at the base rock and remineralizing it with new metals as it goes. That can happen! We call it a porphyry deposit, particularly in igneous rock. It’s not exactly surprising that a hydrothermal fluid would find igneous rock: the fluid is volcanic in origin, after all, just like igneous rock. (That’s the definition of igneous: a rock of volcanic origin.) Igneous rocks, like granite, tend not to be terribly reactive so the fluid can diffuse through relatively unchanged.

Igneous rocks aren’t the only option, though. If the hydrothermal fluid hits carbonates, well, I did mention it’s acidic, right? Acid and carbonates are not friends, so all sorts of chemistry happens, such that geologists give the resulting metamorphic formation a special name: skarn. Though similar in origin, skarns are often considered a different type of deposit, so we’ll talk about the simpler case, diffusion through non-reactive rocks, before getting back to the rocks that sound like an 80s fantasy villain. (Beware Lord Skarn!)

Continue reading “Ore Formation: Return Of The Revenge Of The Fluids” →