Home-made submersibles & helmet Pics

[FFMDiver]

I just saw a few pics of homemade submersibles & helmet Pics on a recent thread and felt this had to be expanded. Please post any and all pics of your homemade contraptions (ie. diving hemets, subs, bells, etc.) with a small desription. I eat this stuff up..its just fantastic!:toilet:

[ew1usnr]

bmuise once bubbled...
I just saw a few pics of homemade submersibles & helmet Pics on a recent thread and felt this had to be expanded. Please post any and all pics of your homemade contraptions (ie. diving hemets, subs, bells, etc.) with a small desription. I eat this stuff up..its just fantastic!:toilet:

The original thread is: http://www.scubaboard.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=37111

Glad that you liked them. The helmet was interesting. It had a big frontal area and even a slight current was difficult to walk against. I weighted it down with barbell weights suspended on under both arms.

The submarine started as an idea back around 1989 for a portabe decompression chamber to use after long cave dives. A decompression might easily last an hour or two. Some cave divers inverted cattle watering troughs, lodged them against the cave ceiling and filled them with air. They floated in the trough in their BC jackets while decompressing. It got their heads out of the water, allowed them to talk, and made for a safer, more comfortable decompression. But for doing multi-level deco you would need multiple troughs. And you need a level ceiling of the proper height (deco stop depth) to place each trough. And all that lift pressed against the ceiling of a cave scared me. What would it do to the structural integrity of the cave? I figured that the submersible was a better idea because I could walk it up a slope and do my decompression inside it at the different stage depths. And I could stay partially dry, eat lunch, and read a magazine while decompressing. It actually sort of worked. I'll post a couple of pictures tonight that will show it better.

[ew1usnr]

Here's another shot of the helmet. It could be thought of as a large volume, full face mask. I didn't include a purge valve because those are considered to be a "failure point".

[DeepScuba]

I've been kicking around the idea of a helmet-cam.

Maybe it's been made already, but I haven't seen one yet.

Just the "head" to go inside a small flash light. Mount the electronic holding device (Harddrive) in a canister on the hip.

Anyone got some spare parts for that?

[scuba-punk]

Man Gilligan, of course I know where you can get a tiny COLOR camera...

http://www.supercircuits.com/STORE/prodinfo.asp?number=PC169XP&variation=&aitem=2&mitem=20

Inexpensive, color, small. Just need a little delrin and lexan for the case! Thinking of using one of these in an ROV that I plan to build for a class project.

-Frank =-)

Or, you can get the whole thing from Sartek Industries.

[SeaJay]

Now THIS is something that I'm seriously interested in... How would you make that camera record the video?

[scuba-punk]

You can either run a tether to the surface that supplies 12V and a some sort of coax or twisted pair for the video signal... 300 feet of that ought to be heavy enough. Plug the cable into a battery and a VCR and you got yourself and underwater video recorder... Don't forget the housing for the CCD element. Something like a 10W HID lighthead ought to be close...

- OR -

Buy a foot of 6" diameter aluminum pipe, some latches, 2 round pieces of lexan and a mini dv camera...

- OR -

Go with the CCD element, and get one of those portable video recorders (I think Panasonic makes one) and throw the recorder and batteries in an enclosure to attach to your harness somehow... :)

-Frank =-)

[canuckdiver]

scubapunk-17055 once bubbled...


Go with the CCD element, and get one of those portable video recorders (I think Panasonic makes one) and throw the recorder and batteries in an enclosure to attach to your harness somehow... :)

-Frank =-)

hmmm, I LIKE this idea!

I've seen the cameras, but anybody know of a small recorder that would allow for about 2 hrs of video, and be reasonably cheap?

[scuba-punk]

Go to ebay and look for a HI-8 or mini dv video camera with a broken video part, but that still records. Might be hard to find, but it would be small and inexpsensive...

The Panasonic unit I mentioned is this one.
http://google-cnet.com.com/Panasonic_SV_AV30_e_wear/4014-6500_9-20788213.html?q=

Plus, it has a small screen to view the playback... Looks like the street price is around $300 to $350 US. The downside is that it uses SD cards, so even with a 512MB card, you're looking at only 90 minutes of video...

Anyone know of anything else? Boy, wouldn't this be funny if this were the first device created on scubaboard.com by all the greatest thinking minds from across the globe? hehehehe... Just kidding. BTW, did we hijack this thread yet?

-Frank =-)

[FFMDiver]

I own a video camera that is roughly the size of a credit card that outputs an AVI file through a USB port. It sells for $99. Add 256 flash memory for $45 and you have video for 15min.

http://shop.store.yahoo.com/quantumshoppes/aipodv4in1di.html