Aquafina Water Bottle Boat: The Evolution Of My Arduino RC Boat Part 2

The Evolution of a New Project.
This is the second video in our new series about our struggle of building a bigger and better boat out of stuff from our house.
In this video I'm going to show the second phase of my first homemade RC boat. As you saw in the last video, I was mostly playing around with my parts to see if it was possible to make a bigger boat and it was. So, I got to work on my bigger boat prototype. I used 4 Aquafina water bottles as pontoons and attached them to some water bottle mounts that I designed and 3D printed myself.
I wanted to try using underwater propulsion to move the boat because it’s something I have haven’t done before. I printed out a propeller that I found on Thingiverse and put it together with some other pieces I made. The boat uses a rubber band as a belt to drive the propeller. I did this because it was the easiest thing to do at the time. Now it’s time for some test runs. As you can see, the boat splashed a lot and was super slow.
So, I switched to using gears to drive the propeller instead. I 3d printed the gear box and attached it to a blind rod. I used a blind rod for this because it was plastic and hexagon shaped. The gear ratio is 1-1 and it uses the same propeller, and boat frame as the previous version. Assembling the gear box was a little bit harder than putting together the rubber band belt but it was worth it. The gearbox assembly is mounted to this piece of wood I found in the garage. I soaked the piece of wood in DW40 for about 24 hours to waterproof it, and so far, it is not showing any signs of water damage which is very good. I soldered some headers to motor so I could plug it in to my RC receiver. I attached the gearbox to the back of the boat and tested it out. It worked.
Next, I got to work on the rudder. I 3d printed most of the parts for the rudder assembly and putting it together was easy. This system worked significantly better than the last one. It worked so that I decided to take bigger boat out to the pond for some long-range test runs. It worked pretty well and I didn't lose contact with it. So, we decided it was safe enough to mount our Insta360 GO3 to deck. Here's a first-person view from the boat. There was one close call in the middle of the pond with some foul waterfowl.
That's all for this video, come back for the next one to see the third phase of construction.
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Flexing Battery Holders with Integrated Spring: www.thingivers...
by Pixelle is licensed under the Creative Commons - Attribution - Non-Commercial license.
Propeller: www.thingivers...
by dreyfusduke is licensed under the Creative Commons - Attribution - Share Alike license.
I put two holes for mounting on the propeller that I printed.