See, this is one of the things I love about working Fridays out of the BlackBerry space at the Communitech Hub…
Tony Reinhart and I were heading out to grab some lunch, and I saw this giant tank of water out front with these really cool lunchbox-sized submersibles.
Happily, Deep Trekker company president, Sam Macdonald, was around to answer my rapid-fire questions. She had both the biz and tech answers for me. Applications of this vehicle range from the fishing industry, to environmental inspection, to police services, and even NASA has one. The DTG2 is powered by on-board lithium-ion batteries, and is tethered only for control and transmission of the analog video signal up to the controller
I really liked the fit and finish of the cast aluminum body with the wrap-around plastic window for the camera. Inside the vehicle, you’ll find plain unpressurized air, the buoyancy of which is balanced by the ballast plates up by the handle, to give an overall neutral buoyancy in water. This tuneable buoyancy must come in handy when mounting attachments like a gripper to the mount points visible just underneath the DTG2 on either side of the window. What really blew my hair back was the internal geared mechanism that allows all the guts to rotate relative to the outer shell. The internal mass is always pulled to the lowest point, so…
pushing the right-hand joystick forward effectively rotates the outer shell with the thrusters so the “nose” is pointed down. Then you can push the left-hand joystick to drive both thrusters forward and dive the vehicle. This all gets really intuitive after 5 minutes at the wheel. Joysticking left and right on the thrusters spins the DTG2 on a dime. Super nimble. Sweet screen on this controller that offered a wide angle and worked well in high ambient light. (No, I’m not on commission)
The tank made for fun driving.
Good Record article by Chuck Howitt here on Deep Trekker. Thanks for the test drive, Sam.
Happy making,
DW