Fog Machine Maker Vosentech Is Building an Open Source Submersible to Film the Mariana Trench
Low-cost "drop camera" submersible is based on off-the-shelf cameras and an Arduino-compatible control system.
Vosentech, a company best known for its compact yet high-performance fog machines, is aiming to send an Arduino-compatible open source submersible camera to explore the Mariana Trench — more than 36,000 feet under the sea.
"We [will] try to conduct the world's eighth expedition to the deepest part of our world's oceans without spending millions of dollars," Vosentech explains of the company's aims for the project, dubbed Mariana Trench or Bust. "The goal of the project is pretty simple: it is to collect the world's first 360-degree footage from the deepest part of our world's oceans, the Mariana Trench, using some sort of custom-built robotic device that we're going to build."
A submersible vehicle capable of surviving a journey to one of the most inhospitable places on Earth, at the base of a column of water more than 36,000 feet high and subject to pressures in excess of 1,000 atmospheres (around 15,750 pounds per square inch (PSI)), is a challenging enough prospect — but Vosentech aims to do it on a shoestring budget, using readily-available electronics and designs it plans to publish under open source licenses.
"Apart from providing (hopefully) entertaining content," the company says of the project, "we expect this project will go much further and actually help make deep sea research more accessible to smaller organizations. To facilitate this, we'll be releasing all of the designs (circuit, code and 3D models) as open source materials for you to use as you please."
The Vosentech vessel is built using polished polycarbonate end caps and a four-way stainless steel housing, and isn't designed for crewed use: instead, it acts as a "drop camera" system which will head to the bottom, film, and automatically return. The build uses a syntactic foam comprised of hollow glass spheres — the same stuff they use on commercial submersibles," the company says — to survive the extreme pressures.
Within the housing is an off-the-shelf Samsung Gear 360 camera and an electronics package driven by a Microchip ATmega3209 programmed in the Arduino IDE. Elsewhere in the electronics package is a GPS receiver, for tracking the location of the submersible when it hopefully returns from its mission, and a set of 18650 battery cells which should allow for a runtime of up to 12 hours.
Videos detailing the work on the project so far are available on Vosentech's YouTube channel, and reproduced above, though while the company has promised to release design files and source code under an open source license the links have not yet been published to its project page.