LOL, Minnesota: Land of ten thousand mud puddles. Great project! One of the most interesting of your builds. I recommend getting something similar to a basement watchdog to put inside your airtight part. They are cheap, and will alert you (loudly) too the presence of water. You could use a balloon lightly inflated within view of the camera as a VERY make sift depth gauge.
I've had pretty good success using "waterproof" car backup cameras for underwater fishing cams down to about 30ft. I've had failures below that. It helps to coat them with spray on conformal coating first. I seal the RCA connections by casting cooking wax around them.
Cool! I do have a backup camera that came with the screen, it might be nice to have a color navcam on the next version of this. I can think of a few tunnels around the Twin Cities that it needs to go investigate :-)
Thanks for sharing this video! I am also planning to make something similar. I will definitely use your experience. Your channel is very intriguing to me btw, keep it up!
Glad you like it! I still need to work out a few issues, and I'll probably have a follow up video. I want to seal / waterproof the airtight compartments better, and improve the buoyancy adjustments. In this video I went too deep and the central box as well as some of the lights flooded, making it sink. Some kind of compressed air ballast system would be cool, but more complicated!
Extremely cool. Quite shocking to see how far the mine went in. Wonder whether potting it in candle wax would solve the water problem. Might also be possible to make a depth sensor from a syringe/membrane, spring and potentiometer that relies on expansion of air.
Yeah, cave diving is right up there with the deadliest hobbies, I think right after BASE jumping. I'll leave it to the robots, at least if this thing gets stuck somewhere I'm only out $20 worth of plumbing and scrap electronics!
