Quote:
Originally Posted by Mikell Taylor
Ask one of my former interns (Gui or Ana perhaps) about the robo shark they dissected -- I think the manufacturers used copious amounts of grease to "waterproof" that guy's servos.
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I've also polled folks who have built swimmers for Olin's Design Nature course, and I think we've come up at the best DIY underwater servo solution possible on a budget.
- Get a normal hobby servo
- Open it up, coat circuit board in epoxy
- Create stuffing-box-like seal with two O-rings between the output "horn" and the inside of the case
- Reassemble servo in mineral oil
- Dip servo is plasti-dip
I don't know anyone who has done
all of these steps on a single servo, but doing a few of them gets you at least an hour of underwater runtime. Doing all of them hopefully gets you more.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by JesseK
If you did a single motor design, it's easy to encapsulate that into a watertight container.
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The really tricky thing is we're going for a biomimetic swimming design, so just rotary motion from a motor isn't terribly useful. We need to wiggle like a real fish. I really like your link to how to waterproof motors though.
Ultimately it looks like we're going to go with a design that only has hydraulic components outside of our watertight shell, so maybe I won't need to run electronics underwater after all!