DIY High Power Underwater Light on ROV Submarine

this video is sponsored by PCB way I'll be the first to admit this is kind of a weird aimless project compared to what I typically do on this channel but in the end it turned out to be pretty cool so here we go it all started when I decided it would be fun to design a solid aluminum waterproof enclosure for the Lumi boost LED driver from Stratus LEDs my goal with this was to try and illuminate a body of water from the bottom to create some interesting long exposure photography effects where the entire Lake would kind of look like it's glowing I designed this enclosure in onshape before setting the files off to be manufactured I 3D printed this mock-up to make sure all the parts would fit all was well so then I sent the files to PCV way to be machined oh boy oh opening machine to Parts is the best look at that thing holy cow that is pretty that is so pretty this is the inductor heat sink that goes on top of the inductor on the Lumi boost so this thing will fit right here and this is supposed to be the polycarbonate windshield that fits over the entire thing oh this is sick after that it was time to start the assembly first I soldered some wires onto the 200 watt cobs I'm using Cobb stands for chip on board array it's basically just a bunch of little LED diodes wired together to make one big emitter next I soldered the cob onto the Lumi boost the Lumi boost is basically just a high-tech DC to DC boost converter that lets you power the 60 volt LED off of 12 or 24 volts and it also allows you to control dimming with an RC Servo signal or DMX then I soldered on a thermistor for active temperature control this allows the Lumi boost to dim the LED as it starts to get too hot next I soldered on the power input wires and put some sill pads on the thermally Active Components thermal grease was used in between the LED and the heatsink I then placed all the electronics in the housing and routed the thermistor underneath the LED in order to get the Lumi Boost Set up properly I plugged it in via USB and connected it to the configuration software this allows you to set up the max output current low voltage cutoff Max temperature and stuff like that I then connected power to confirm it was all all working and then screwed the Lumi boost into the housing the large inductor on top of the Lumi boost also gets quite hot so I placed a sill pad on that and then clamped it in place with this aluminum block I'm using 14 gauge speaker wire for the input since it's cheap and the wire will need to be quite long that got soldered onto the Lumi boost inputs and then heat shrinked to form a seal I made a little silicone Dam on the outside and then once that dried I mixed up some epoxy and injected it into a little Reservoir that I made on the inside the wire itself is a pretty tight fit into this inner slot and then the outer recessed area was what got filled with epoxy after that I installed this reflector it also serves the purpose of securing the LED in place the screws that hold it on go through the entire housing so I was sure to silicone those before putting them in I measured that the LED was drawing 8 amps if I touched the alligator clips directly onto its input connector and 8.7 amps if the power goes through the wire that means there's about 19 watts of losses in this wire that's out of the 230 Watts it's drawing in total to seal the cover I added silicone around the edge and screwed it on with a crap load of screws here's the first test I put some food coloring in the water to visualize the convection currents from the hot aluminum pretty neat unfortunately after several hours underwater there was some condensation inside my design had failed to give the Lumi boost a little extra protection I conformal coated it to strain relieve the power wires I 3D printed this clamp thing here that bolts on the back and then it was ready for a test at a tiki party I figured it would be nice to get some additional underwater Ambiance lighting for maximal party Vibes I'm going to plug this in and then Chuck it oh wow I can see weeds down there already whoa it just looks green that's it if I let the light sink too deep it would just get covered in Lake weeds and not look that cool but if I pulled it up closer to the surface it would illuminate all the weeds from above and looked awesome definitely a good accessory for nighttime swimming makes it easier to check for sharks it also creates some epic mood lighting for when Colin wants to Star as the lake monster a real a plus performance oh wow oh it shines in the trees that's so cool the light on the other hand did not perform that well it never turned off due to water Ingress but after the party there was definitely a few drops in the enclosure I'm pretty sure this is because I didn't take the rubber sheath off the wire at the area I potted an epoxy so water was probably just squishing in around that I later learned that for proper waterproofing you really need to strip back the sheath and Tin the wire strands for the section that gets potted that way no water can squeeze through I later redesigned the enclosure to have a much longer epoxy trough but I have not gotten around to testing out this newer version yet if you want these files they're available to the whole wide world in onshape onshape is a cloud native CAD platform that's free for hobbyists if you want to access or modify any of the cad files from this video just click on the on-shaped link in the description you'll just need to sign up for a free onshape account and then boom you'll have access to everything including all the source sketches so you you can make whatever modifications you want I make all of my projects public on onshape so it's basically like you have the password to my cat account pretty awesome so just throwing the light into the lake didn't quite seem to give the effect that I was looking for which was to make the whole body of water just subtly glow from the depths so I decided that it might be a good move to mount the light on an RC boat that could drive around during the long exposure photograph today we're building today we're building a boat okay now we're looking for sticks you got a lot of sticks but not the right sticks here's sticks it's the right sticks it's too too big of a stick here we go I think this is the sticks we need perfect sticks right here should we make a sailboat put a sail on this sucker have a blow away right on you can be the stick Master yeah I don't know we might need to hit up the grocery store for Tupperware my first autonomous boat that I ever built is just a tupperware so what's what's the problem with Tupperware boats it pushes a ton of water ah scientists okay I guess we can't do that we'll need to make some Ultra hydrodynamic foam holes we got these just Pine sticks right now but we could make this a luxury yacht if we upgrade to Cedar from the scrap wood pile this is styrofoam though and I I hate styrofoam because it just like breaks apart into a bunch of little chunks and it's just terrible to clean up this is what we need five bucks it's kind of expensive but oh yeah nice and hard the stickmaster likes is foam hard oh that would make a good boat maybe not no oh that's like a shark tooth yeah dude you could pan for gold oh boy yeah this is the jackpot that'll do as long as it doesn't flip over because it doesn't seal it just closes this probably isn't watertight either that's better oh yeah let's do that one in the sea of Hardware we found our candidates then we got to work building our boat that was hundreds of miles away from my workshop so the construction quality is a bit less than normal but that's okay because all this thing really needs to do is hold the light and a battery and not sink I decided to do a trimaran configuration because well actually I don't know why but that's the way it ended up so these are the little motors from my foamy Chrono plan and I think we're gonna use them for this boat they're kind of too small but whatever it's all we have oh it's white I haven't used a white silicone before it's like car run a turkey see if she fits oh yeah now it's hitting the wire we'll have to carve out a path for the wire right here but that's it this is the light pod so we've been working on this for about six hours now and we got all three holes glued together we got our our Bridge put on okay we'll pick up again tomorrow getting ready for the maiden voyage the water's starting to move the Tide's coming in I guess it's going out right before we test it out a quick word about the sponsor of this video PCB way without PCB way I probably never even would have started this project it was the fact that I could easily get the components CNC machined by PCB Way's online Manufacturing Services that made me do it in the first place they also offer sheet metal fabrication 3D printing injection molding and vacuum casting another thing I had PCB way make recently was this custom board not only did they fabricate the board but they also did all the assembly and soldering I can't tell you what it does yet but I can tell you it sure is awesome so be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss out click on the link in the description to check out all the services pcboa offers thanks again to PCB way for sponsoring this video here we go let's see if it floats oh it totally nose having oh it's super nose heavy oh that sucks it'll probably still drive though [Music] oh no problem look at that [Music] wow yeah that's like a perfect speed we're Geniuses this is the best boat ever we're on a mission we're on a mission we're here at the Lido Island Bridge we're gonna go do a test drive Garrett's down there putting the boat in the water and we got the time lapse camera rolling up here scooting right along the guy thinks we're gonna catch a great white shark with it he thinks we're gonna come up short a great wife though you know yesterday oh well I'd be happy with that yeah a little smaller tastes better though so it turns out our boat is very difficult to drive in a straight line so we let the time lapse camera run while we tried driving the boat back and forth this was difficult because the boat has no inherent yaw stability and the breeze was really pushing it around I composited together all the time lapse photos in Photoshop and this is what we get kind of neat but far from the original Vision I was going for we shouldn't put a hook on it official the fish will bite it and then just pull it away and that's the last we'll ever see in this boat there's totally a ton of little fish under there yeah wow after that we took the light off the boat and went back to the canal to see if we could find some sand sharks right oh wow I could already see fish oh that's cool there are so unfortunately we didn't find any Sand Sharks but we did get plenty of minnows they seem to be attracted to the light we did however discover that the air has lots of stuff in it pretty amazing these must all just be like sea particles from the ocean it's a parachutist with sparklers that's pretty cool mounting the light directly on the boat did not seem to work so what's next well I decided that instead of abiding by the sunk cost fallacy and moving on to a project that's actually worth my time I climbed down deeper into the burning dumpster that is this project and what does that involve well we got some screws some 3D printed Parts a spindle with a slip ring and boom just like that we have a winch that can pull the light up and down with the flip of a switch it goes down just fine but it struggles going up the only problem was that it didn't work not enough torque so I climbed down further into the dumpster with some 3D printed gears another Servo a bigger Gear with a bearing and a shaft and some more screws voila just like that we now have a winch that actually works but the real question is will I make the pictures of the water any better it hurts it was so back at me it seems like you just have to flip over that's real sketchy I didn't even get the battery he's sitting up here it might fall off but if it does it'll probably just hang there okay lowering the light oh that's sick you can see all the weeds wow um now it snows heavy because you've lost the weight in the back yeah that could be oh and it seems like that battery might fall off yeah let's bring that one back look at the weeds that's so cool from a top-down view it actually looks pretty cool with the light shining through all the weeds but the problem is the area around the light is super blown out so we need to take only the properly exposed parts of each image and composite them together I did this manually in Photoshop and here's what you get it's not terrible but definitely not what I was originally going for the light sources are way too uneven to be what I want and the boat would need to drive over the entire Bay to make it work but I mean it's like sort of cool I sent the fee fish underwater drone to see what the light looked like from below and it was not very interesting at all whoa there's already stuff I'm seeing whoa there's wood look at that but hey you know what maybe putting the light on the submarine would be much better than putting it on a boat yeah let's give that a try since the light itself is negatively buoyant I had to add some foam to make it neutrally buoyant I want it to go much deeper with the sub than the boat winch could go so I extended The Wire by about 40 feet due to all the added resistance from the longer wire the voltage was sagging too much for the light to handle to fix that I'm using this big boost converter on the shore that boosts the 24 volts from the 6s LiPO batteries up to 31 volts to send Through the Wire the Lumi boost is only rated for 32 volts on the input so I couldn't go any higher than that making a waterproof battery that mounts to the submarine would have been a much better solution but also a lot more work it's definitely still buoyant I'll try and go down there it goes no problem so you take the controller remember how to drive no no is this going up or down this is going this is up and down oh shoot this is forward and backwards oh yeah okay okay I'm gonna go start the uh start the GoPro night lapse you see the bottom yet Sebastian yeah yeah 24 feet do you see any lime bikes no but I there's rocks and stuff wait I found I found something cool you want to figure out what this is here yeah what is it hi could that be like some like a like a pair of pliers yeah pliers yeah sick okay uh that's all the light tether we have so I'm gonna plug in the Boost converter now here it goes cool wowie that looks pretty neat actually so my hope is that that illuminates the bottom of the bridge well enough okay well I'm at 27 feet so if I go up I'm sure it'll get more light so I would maybe try and aim for like 25 feet all right yeah and just drive back and forth yeah it's glowing on the bottom I think this is gonna look really cool oh yeah you're right the camera's pretty good at low light huh like night vision it looks cool yeah this is gonna look sick oh you can see the sub lights it's gonna look radioactive I see the bottom okay I'm gonna turn off the lights on the sub whoa okay so this is this is with all oh there's see that see that's what I'm saying we're gonna get caught in this thing that's the light tether right there but that's only with the light from the uh from the upwards facing light that's kind of trippy well there's like not a lot of stuff down there it's just all gravel oh wait is that something yeah look at that there's a pipe or a tree oh there's a fish oh I just saw a fish so after driving around for quite a while we collected plenty of long exposure still frames to try and composite altogether I then loaded up the images in Photoshop as layers and then did the same thing as before where I deleted the Overexposed bits of each image and composited them all together this one that was shot on the GoPro turned out pretty uneven so I ended up kind of cheating and adding a radial gradient to smooth out the light and this is what we end up with ooh wee this one was shot on the a7s II I ended up just keeping the uneven lighting because it looks kind of cool still not what I was originally envisioning for the project but I was happy enough with the result I think to really get the whole body of water to Glow you would need a much brighter light at a much deeper depth to get it to diffuse as much as possible you'd also need to be able to drive the light around the entire area and not just a section maybe I'll try that some other time so that's pretty much it for this video check this out Daniel it's a fish right there what do you see is that a fish it's a fish it actually made a friend wow oh did he leave oh he left is that like a Christmas tree I'm serious did somebody throw a Christmas tree in there hold up hold up I found look at that object right there is that it I it kind of looked like a knife a second ago I know I want to find a murder weapon it might be does this make you want your own submarine yes you can look for frogs yeah will you give me one for Christmas get you a frog or a submarine a frog and summary oh look at the green glow on our faces it's like uh it's like Radioactive it's it's so cool that's like the color of the water

Channel: rctestflight

Views: 354,506

Keywords: rc, submarine, light, underwater, long exposure, photography, water, glow

Id: GeHeMZa92eI

Length: 16min 50sec (1010 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 04 2023