We all live in a (small) yellow submarine

The ROV just had a couple of coats of paint and has come up rather nice.
For those keen in photography the photo of the ballast tank was taken with F32 - to get quite a reasonable depth of field.

Flexible ROV cabling system.

To provide maximum flexibility for the ROV cabling and allow different connections to be simply added and removed, I have devised an ingenious modular cabling system. This way any cables - from optical, coax or Ethernet can be swapped over in a matter of seconds and are easily removed for travelling.
The system involves screw ports on the side of the hull were different cables, encased within screw plugs can be added or removed. Since these are separate from the main back screw-on panel, the cables can be screwed in, then plugged in (to avoiding twisting) and finally the back plate can be screwed on.

ROV webpage

I have now put together an ROV page, which among other things will contain a pictorial summary of the progress of the project thus far.
The page is here.

ROV "Bathtub Test"

Yesterday I filled up the bathtub (from rainwater - hence the sediment in the tub) to test out the ROV's buoyancy and thruster power.
The tests indicate that an additional 3kg of weight it required to make the ROV neurally buoyant.
Also one thruster (show in the video) seemed to be sufficient to push the ROV along nicely. With two thrusters providing differential control the ROV should be able to have a semi-decent speed.
My initial plan was to use a further two bilge pumps to control depth (one pointing up, one pointing down).
The tests seemed to indicate that the bilge pumps I was using weren’t sufficiently powerful to perform this function. I now plan to use one pump fitted with a propeller (alike the thrusters), mounted on the bottom of the ROV to allow the ROV to dive and surface.

Converter Pictures

Here are some promised pictures of my line-input to mic converter.
The circuitry was encased within hot glue (pic2) and was then covered with heatshrink (not shown). The circuit used was from: here