Homebuilt ROVs Forum

That's good to hear that your ESC's are not getting hot. I was concerned about getting rid of heat when they're enclosed in the hull so I've mounted mine on an aluminium plate and had considered adding a temperature sensor and maybe water cooling.

yes, hopefully some more recent activity on here will inspire others, my project has been ongoing for years and technology is getting cheaper and smaller all the time. maybe we'll get cheap fibre optic video transmitters one day, and cheap tethers too. lol. we can dream. a second hand/ex-hire 40m videoRay tether goes for £999+tax.


Good luck with programming your BLHeli ESC's, fingers crossed they're not locked like my SimonK one.
The whole point of open source firmware is that you can adapt it to suit your project so I don't know why they lock you from reading the HEX file.

No black magic in the drone ESC's lol. it's all about keeping the internal resistance of the switching FETS low. low resistance means low power loss as heat.

A 16" prop on a quadcopter sounds like a beast!!! that would blow my DJI Phantom out of the sky.

Good luck with Scout.

Heat wise I think I will be fine, I would advise against water cooling unless you were just going to have a internal closed loop filled with mineral oil. I'm actually an electronics technician so I quite understand how these low resistance FETS work I was just being comical, I've worked on gear that used vacuum tubes lol. This ROV is just a practice run to get me into the mind set and look for simple solutions, I really would like to build a ROV capable of 1000 feet. Tether wise I was thinking about buying 4 POE powered inline ethernet extenders with a POE power supply topside with my computer and just potting the extenders in epoxy.

Vaccuum tubes... now you're taking me back. called valves over this side of the pond of course. yes, I've worked on a few valve RF power amplifiers. maybe we could squeeze some acorn valves into a ROV just for the hell of it. it would be safe against EMP when the shit hits the fan.
yeah, watercooling probably not a good idea, I wouldn't want to pump my hull full of seawater if a pipe splits.

Was only able to cast one flange this morning, but there's the pictures from todays adventure.