Submarines

Posted byRandall 664 Comments on Submarines

I’m going through a rough period right now. There’s an illness in my family and I’m having a hard time focusing on anything but worrying and trying to take care of health stuff. Everyone is going to be okay, but it’s going to be a difficult four or five months, and I really appreciate your patience and understanding. I’m going to keep putting up comics, but I don’t how much else I’ll be able to work on.

To anyone I’ve been corresponding with, I’m sorry that I may be even more tardy than usual. While davean (the xkcd sysadmin/business manager) monitors the press@xkcd.com address, I know he only forwards to me a fraction of the huge flood of mail that goes there. If you’re trying to reach me personally about something, you can write to me directly at xkcd@xkcd.com, but I’m afraid I won’t able to reply to most of it right now.

I know there haven’t been any posts here in a while. Since most of my projects are on hold right now, I thought I’d share some pictures from one that’s almost done: an underwater ROV. Exploring lakes and oceans has always fascinated me, and while I’ve spent a lot of time snorkeling and free diving, in the end I’m more interested in sending robots than going myself.

I tried to build a couple of ROVs in high school out of scavenged R/C cars and spare parts, but none of them ever worked very well. Last summer, I got interested again and picked up an Inventivity ROV-in-a-Box:

Inventivity ROVIAB

It’s a very basic kit designed to use off-the-shelf parts as much as possible, to encourage people to play with the design or expand on it. I’ve gotten a lot of help and some cool ideas from the company founder, Dr. Karen Suhm, who coaches robotics teams in ROV-building competitions and generally knows everything about ROVs. The kit comes with a good set of underwater motors and a sensitive camera, and this summer I started modifying it to use an Arduino and joystick control, running the whole thing over Cat-5 cable (which significantly lightened the tether). This will also let me add other equipment, like a still camera, depth gauge, compass, and sonar.

It’s very close to being finished—I just have a couple wires to reroute and a leak to seal—but for now, here are some pictures from construction and testing:

Hello.

I made a coupler so the tether could be detached, and added a chamber to hold the Arduino, Ethernet shield, and motor control board. A Python script on the surface translates joystick values into motor speeds, and the Arduino has some code to listen to commands via the Ethernet and control the motors using three TLE-5206 H-bridges. The 5206s offer more protection than some other H-bridges—I initially used some smaller chips, and managed to blow out a couple. (Thank you to mpanetta of #sparkfun for hooking me up with the 5206s.)

A note to anyone who wants to build something like this: the Arduino isn’t actually capable of processing video, so you’ll need to either put an Ethernet camera and hub on the rover, or—if your camera isn’t digital—do what I did and divert two of the Cat-5’s twisted pairs to carry RCA video, running the Ethernet solely on the other half.

This canoe (and everything else in the shot) travels through time.

My friend Mike loaned his canoe for depth testing in Walden Pond, which is (according to data from the 1940s) the deepest lake in Massachusetts

It's about 90 feet down from here.

At the bottom of Walden, there are close to three extra atmospheres of pressure.

In this shot, read left to right.

The zip ties double as binary depth markers. This one is 14 meters.

Shlooooop.

This is the vacuum pump for sealing up wires passing into the sub (it’s sitting atop a draft of the online communities map). If you open up the exterior/water side of a cable and submerse it in a pool of marine epoxy, then apply suction to the dry interior of the sub, it sucks the epoxy through the cable, plugging it up completely. You can also use it to suck all the air out of a wine bottle with random objects inside. It’s fun to see how different materials react to a near-vacuum—particularly if you’ve just drunk a bottle of wine. I didn’t get much more done that day.

Lastly, here’s a clip of the bottom of Walden Pond, about 80 feet below the surface.  This was an unpowered pressure test—the sub was just dangling on a rope—so it’s not very exciting, but it was the only test where I could record the video feed:

The Walden lakebed is pretty dead—the material you’re seeing is flakes of debris stirred up by the sub. In other lakes, we’ve found cooler stuff.  In Seymour Pond on Cape Cod, we had huge catfish fish swim up to the camera and look at it, and we explored a sunken fishing boat on the bottom of Sheep Pond.  I’ve also learned that deck chairs apparently fall off docks all the time—the lakebed 20 feet below the dock on one lake was absolutely littered with them.  When I get a chance to send it to some more interesting places, I’ll be sure to share footage.

P.S. A belated thank-you to the NYC Makerbotters; after I posted comic #743, they fabricated and mailed to me an actual tiny open-source violin.

664 replies on “Submarines”

  1. Hey. I understand how you feel; I deal with not only my own sickness, but other sicknesses in my family too (my mom has MS). God be with you and yours, if you believe in that, otherwise, know all of your fans will be thinking of you! 🙂

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  4. Randall I’m very sorry to hear about what you’re going through. It seems as though you’re close to your family, and that in itself is always a great help. My family went through a rough period last year, and all I can say is: things DO get better. My best wishes to you and your family.
    Hugs from Mexico 🙂

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  5. Hey,
    Remember this – not everyone who reads xkcd has been with you since the beginning, myself included. However, everyone I know who reads xkcd has read every single one. We all took time to read 820 awesome comics. They have to be great for anyone to take that much time out of their day to read them.
    You write the best webcomics out there, bar none, and if ever you feel bad about taking time off the comic to help your family, even for an instant, don’t. You’ve earned it. If you can’t come up with something, we can all just click Random until things are better for you – and we will still laugh, and enjoy the comics.
    My family is going through a rough time, too. I feel for you. My little sister was just diagnosed with celiac, and we’ve all had to radically change our diets. You guys will pull through, just like my family is starting to get used to our changes.
    Good luck to your family, and I hope you get through it okay. Best wishes from Colorado.

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  7. Dear Randel,
    I have to agree with Drew, I haven’t been with you since you first started, but the day i discovered XKCD i read every single one, laughing for hours upon hours! Now, the first thing i do when i wake up MWF is read your comic! It is by far the best way i can think of to start the day!
    Now, i wouldn’t say you’ve earned time off, because that implies you owe us anything at all! You can do whatever you please. We, as your readers, understand what you are going through and know you need a time away. Don’t stress about pleasing us, we’ll be here when you’re ready! You have my best wishes and prayers.

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  9. Best wishes to you and your family

    Your 5-minute cartoons are awesome! Thank you for sharing them with us.

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  10. Take care Randall! I wish I could say something witty here to make you laugh.. it feels like that’s the least I could do after you’ve made me chuckle just about every day. Soooo, I have a joke.

    I’d say stop me if you’ve heard this one before but… well,

    What’s the difference between Mick Jagger and Scottish sheep herder?
    Give up?

    Mick Jagger says, “Hey! You! Get off of my cloud!”

    The Scottish sheep herder says, “Hey! McCloud! Get off of my ewe!”

    Hope the family gets well soon! 😉

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  12. Dude, so sorry about your situation. In our office we love taking a peak at your site on a daily basis. We sell jewelry but love comics 😉 I hope all goes well.

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  13. Hi,

    I really hope that things start going your way. Here is a joke. I stole it off the internet and it is nowhere near as funny as any of yours, but I hope it makes you smile:

    Why didn’t the shrimp share his treasure?
    Because he was a little shell fish.

    Oh and you can totally get away with just posting one of your five minute comics – they’re pretty funny and they’ll last longer than giving them out in bunches.

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  15. Randall,

    Take whatever time you need for yourself; I’d even say, feel free to recycle some of your greatest hits if you need to. We’ll be here. I’ve been going through a lot of family illness stuff myself (mom, sister, fiancee — yes, those are three different people), so I’m well familiar with the need to pull back from other obligations.

    Family does come first.

    As an aside, I’ll tell you that, as PhD students, the folks around me regularly share but two online comics — and yours is one of them. And I know I’m not alone when I say: I *want* that captcha system you conceptualized! I want it EVERYWHERE!

    Take care, Randall, and know that your community supports you while you do what you need to support your family. Oh — and *what Drew said.*

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  18. Best wishes to you and your family. There’s plenty in the archive to keep us entertained!

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  19. I am saddened by the news and wish you the best.
    Please do not see the site as a priority.
    Your fans can wait as long as it takes for you to deal with this tough time in your life, for which I would once again like to extend my greatest wishes and prayers to you.

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  20. No worries if you take a break from posting for a few months. We on the internets have short attention spans, but we’ll make an exception for you.

    (Um, actually, I’d make a note in my Google callendar to check back in. I think that still counts.)

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  21. Hey Randall,

    Your family comes first. Don’t dare even think about worrying about xkcd until you get through your rough time. 🙂

    I guess this will just be one out of a thousand good luck messages you will receive. But I wanted to do my relatively insignificant part nevertheless.

    Wish you well, and thanks so much for all the laughs throughout the years.

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  22. All my love an all the best. I do hope everything will turn out acceptable, if not great. Love your humour. Thank you for for so many smiles – and I hope you can smile soon, too.

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  23. Hang in there… you’ve got friends you’ve never met, the whole world over. (Even in Alabama!)

    Breathe, smile, and don’t forget that you’re not alone.

    –Elfi

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  25. 5-Minute Comics #3 is one of the funniest comics you’ve *ever* done.

    Anyway, all the best. Find me (you know how) if there’s any way I can help you with what you’re going through.

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  27. Sorry to hear the awful news Randall. Best wishes from Australia – I hope everything gets better soon.

    B

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  30. One more for luck…

    What Drew said. And Elfi. And everyone else, and now me as well. Dreadfully sorry to hear the news; best wishes to you and yours and please don’t worry about disappointing your fans. Not an issue in any way, shape or form. The “Random” button is fantastic for bringing back favourite bursts of genius from the past; plenty to keep us all amused while you concentrate on what’s much more important.

    The five-minute-fancies are utterly brilliant as well.

    Take care, Randall. Best regards from the UK.

    D

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  31. I’ve been reading your comic for a few years, while studying math and science-y things. It gives me a reason to learn more. The first time I read through your archives, I laughed a lot, and found it amazing. The next time, I got more of the jokes, and it was amazing all over again.

    Your delightful comics have helped me through a slew of rough times, I haven’t been able to find anything quite like them. It’s a shame that there’s nothing so much like XKCD for you to read when you need a little help (or maybe there is and I just haven’t found it).

    Anyways, best of wishes from snowy Minnesota. Take your time recovering, we’ll still be here when you get back. You’re worth the wait.

    Good luck.

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  32. Hope you feel better soon – though you should do more of these 5-minute short collections – it’s like getting 10 comics per day!

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  33. I hope things get smoother for you. I’ve really been enjoying the 5 minute comics this week. The Jupiter one and today’s Pearl Harbor one especially.

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  34. Very sorry to hear that happening to my favorite comics author.
    Hope everything will turn out ok for you and your family.

    Best wishes from Romania!

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  35. Randall, the “E”s in your 5-Minute Comics baffle me. It took me a good couple of minutes to figure out why you were underlining your “F”s.

    Also, I’d like to file a formal complaint with your Captcha thingy. It’s asking me to type foreign words with accents and umlauts. :[

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  36. Hey man,

    You’ve made me laugh more times than I can count…and I’m so grateful for that.

    I know I’m just another voice amongst the hundreds that have already said this, but seriously, I wish you and your family well more than I can put into a coherent sentence.

    So many times I’ve needed a giggle and a bit of inspiration to get me through a tough moment, and I find it here, I just hope if you read this I
    can send a bit of that feeling back to you.

    Peace and love and all that stuff.

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  37. oh god

    i love that it’s one paragraph about the illness, one paragraph about contacting you and then a billion paragraphs about a fucking underwater robot

    this is just gold

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  38. Sorry to hear about the illness, I hope everything works out/gets better.

    This site has kept me thoroughly entertained through many physics and engineering lectures (although perhaps a bit too many lol). The stuff you have on here is absolutely brilliant.
    Wish you the best.

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  39. Best wishes for a speedy recovery at your end, and thank you for the regular doses of sanity I find at XKCD!

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  40. I wish you all the best. My family went through some stuff last year (lost a daughter to leukemia) I understand how priorities change.

    You have given so many people not just laughs but thoughts and meditations. You enrich people’s lives with comedy and beyond. This very morning, I used your “Connections” comic to tell the woman about whom I feel complicated things that I would have called “love” when I was 25 how I feel about her.

    And your 5 minute creations are nothing to apologize for, they are brilliant in their own way.

    Anyway, thank you so much.

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  41. Hey, don’t normally comment on blogs too much, but just a word and best wishes to you and your family. I’ve been really entertained by your wit and comics over the past few years. Hope everything works out.

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  45. You’re brilliant, hilarious, and twisted. Good luck. I hope everything goes smoothly, and that you have moments of peace in which to rest.

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  46. So sorry to hear that you’re going through a rough time–hopefully, things will get better soon, and until then, I think the xkcd fans are enjoying the 5 minute comics and guest comics 🙂

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  47. Best wishes to you and your family. You always bring a smile to my day, here’s hoping things look up for you soon.

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  48. I hope things look up for you and your family soon. Thanks for all the hard work you’ve put into xkcd. I know you’ve cheered up a lot of us countless times.

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  49. Family First – always. Your comics are awesome for this little mathematician to read, but I can wait until all is well and good in your life to get more giggles. Besides, I can always laugh at my favorites by going back through. 🙂

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  50. I just want to add to all the voices here wishing you and your family the best of luck. Wishing you all much better times ahead.

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