Am I pointing to the right direction?

Projects General Guidance
1

Hello Everybody,

I take the opportunity of this thread to thank you for this very helpful forum, full of ressources.

So, here's the story:
I'm working with a friend of mine on a ROV project, he's taking care of the frame/thruster bit, I'm in charge of the "brain" of the machine.
I have been working (and still) on a fixed wing UAV with the ArduPilot Mega (APM 1) I started to build up a bit of experience with arduinos thanks to this amazing piece of equipment
Here's what I would like to achieve:

On board the ROV: an arduino mega which will be driving the thrusters (6 as to give the following movements: back and forth, up and down, right and left, and sideways capabilities).
There will be an array of sensors as well:
Magnetometer, Gyros and accelerometers using this board: Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting.
A depth and current sensor.

In future versions of the ROV we'll have also camera guimbal, but that's for later...

On the surface:

The ROV will be connected (via RS485 on serial port) to a control box.
This control box will have, 2 joysticks a couple of switches connected to an arduino UNO.

Hope I'm clear so far.

What I would like to have, I want to avoid taking a computer on the field with me, is a screen which will display, the following datas (received from the ROV via the UNO):
ROV attitude (yaw, pitch and roll), the bearing, current consumption and depth.
And as well the joysticks' positions (in the form of graphic sliding bar).
I'm thinking of using a 7 to 10 inches screen.

I have spent quite some time already searching this forum, and I found that:
http://www.4dsystems.com.au/prod.php?id=131

I simply wanted to know if I'm heading in the right direction, and if using such module will give me the data display I'm looking for...

Thanks in advance for your answer
Have a great day

Wanderer

2

VGA cable is usually heavy bulky stuff and not the sort of thing you'd want to run out to an ROV. I wouldn't expect a little embedded display adapter to be able to drive the signal over a long distance either - I suspect you'd struggle to get past twenty feet, is that long enough?

You might be able to get more range from a video adapter going for a digital output but I don't know how easy or expensive it would be to get a suitable hand-held screen for that.

I think you might consider switching to Ethernet over CAT5 and use that for bidirectional control and video. This does imply you need a computer at the operator to receive and display the video. If you can find a tablet with an Ethernet connection that could be an easy solution. You'd need to either develop your own display application, or use a 3rd party video display application or web-based viewer. I expect you'd find free versions of both, but finding ones that are compatible with the tablet would be the trick.

3

Hi Peter,

Thanks a lot for taking the time for answering.
I realize I was not very clear on my set up, I'm not intending to run a VGA cable from the ROV itself.
The idea would be: getting the ROV datas (attitude, bearing, depth and current consumption) from the Arduino mega to the Uno via the tether cable and having the 4D system board plugged on the Uno which is part of the surface control system.

Hope I clarified my idea
Thanks
Kind Regards

Wanderer

4

Ah - after your mention of the camera gimbal mount I assumed this setup would include a video feed. Obviously, a comms solution that goes through Arduino wouldn't provide sufficient bandwidth to support anything like that.

5

As an alternative you could use one of these

http://nootropicdesign.com/projectlab/2011/03/20/text-and-graphics-overlay/
depends on the resolution of the readout of you need.