In the Beginning

I am currently a student at Santa Barbara City College, enrolled in Marine Diving Technology. Part of this program includes a class focused on Remote operated vehicles (ROV’s), manned submersibles (submarines) and Atmospheric diving systems (ADS). For our final project we are given a small budget and allowed to construct our own ROV. The class website is : http://instructors.sbcc.edu/barthelmess/rov/index.htm As in the real world we are limed by our budget, time and power supply. Part of the project involves posting to our class blog http://marinetech.blogspot.com/ with periodic updates and useful information for other groups, such as parts suppliers, video cameras etc. I decided to document the process further and have chosen this medium to do so. My fellow group members are; C. Baez, M. Almada, A. Crouse, D. Pyle, S. Keeton, M. Miller, P. Lazazzera.


If for some reason you happen to have knowledge, information or expertise in the areas of ROV’s or electronics these are the areas our group currently needs help with:

CONTROL SYSTEM – Commercial ROV’s use joysticks to control their movement within 3 axes (UP/DOWN, FORWARD/BACKWARD, LEFT/RIGHT, and FIXED POSITION SPIN LEFT/RIGHT) There seem to be several different ways to accomplish this task and they range from switches and lots of wires to using PIC controllers. Currently we know what we want, we just don’t know how to make it. I would make things easier if I had the slightest about electronics but I don’t…I will be going to get an electronics for dummies book soon…