underwater ROV electronics

[Hydrogen]

IM looking for some ideas on how to control an underwater rov with a tether.


Topside im thinking about running the RoboRealm software on a notebook, but from there i don't have any ideas.

Ill need some form of tether do carry data.

on the rov, ill need some way to interface 3 ESCs for the motors. I was thinking a http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/1350  on the ROV with a usb to cat5 converter for a tether?

i also need a way to connect video, a digital compass and a pressure sensor.

any one have any ideas that would involve little programming?

Thanks

[Soeren]

Hi,

i also need a way to connect video, a digital compass and a pressure sensor.

Depending on the length of the wire, the bandwidth of the video signal and how much noise you can live with, you may get away with using a single twisted pair in a cat-5(e) - digital signals (control and/or sensor data) may be more or less visible as noise though, so keep a good amplitude on the video signal.

Spend a little extra at a cat-6 cable, if cat-5 is just on the verge of being useable speedvise.

If that won't do, you need to bundle a 75 Ohm coax line with your cat-5 (you can get cables for combined video and signals, but you probably won't like the price tag). go for a cable with a very tightly weaved shielding (i.e. pro quality), but it can be eg. thin cable like RG-179/U (outer diameter = 1.6mm) if distance and bandwidth is fairly moderate.

any one have any ideas that would involve little programming?

If you don't wanna program (quite a bit), you're really much better off paying your way to a finished product.
We don't build and program robots to save money, we do it to avoid hanging on street corners

[madsci1016]

There's a similar discussion happening here

http://www.societyofrobots.com/robotforum/index.php?topic=11320.0