A submarine made from IKEA jar and legos | Hacker News Reader

A submarine made from IKEA jar and legos

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155 pointsmiohtama28 comments

Original video (year 2020): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdfUSNzc0Xk

2021 design, with a balloon for depth control: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n83cSg3wohU

this tweet is not by the actual creator. Original video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdfUSNzc0Xk

I recently discovered this youtube channel (Brick Expereriment [0]) and I'm addicted. Their videos are fun, clever and smart at the same time and you can learn a bunch of things, related to legos or not!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClsFdM0HzTdF1JYoraQ0aUw

Dang. You beat me to it. I agree.

I greatly enjoy when people put their challenges and how they were overcome into the video of the final product.

It really lets it sink in (pun intended) just how much the engineering process involves testing.

It's something that has become more and more common on YouTube, and that I appreciate a lot. Makers tend to keep the parts where they encounter problems and work-around it to find a solution. I find these videos to be much more enjoyable and relatable. When I design something in Fusion360, about 50% of the time the resulting print is a bit too tight or a bit too loose. It's part of the process.

Magnetic couplings for the motors was a fun way to tackle this without needing to drill anything or use gaskets. I wonder what the efficiency loss due to friction is in comparison to a traditional drive shaft through a gasket.

seems like you could mount the magnets on both sides on bearings (whose housing would either have to be glued or use even more magnets to be fixed to the surface)

Sure, but not sure the rolling friction of bearing on plastic and bearing on bearing race would be less than the current magnet sliding on teflon.

It's also a fair bit of complexity, weight, and expense. Not sure how long bearings would last in the relatively corrosive environment of chlorinated water.

this is great. The fix for the lid flex changing boyancy was also an opportunity: an internal motor that could push the lid up a variable from the inside would allow the whole container to act as a ballast trim tank for very small adjustments. Some RC subs have similar smalll diaphram tanks to complement the larger main ballast (sometimes just for fore-aft angle trim)

The YouTube channel linked to here (Brick Experiment Channel) is just great.

From making submarines, to bending steel axles, to making drones, to climbing walls, to lifting heavy loads, all with legos.

Highly recommended if you're into legos or even if you just like getting answers to "can lego do X?"

The remote is from a toy sub with a syringe like mechanism for buoyancy. It is a complicated designed toy but cheaply price and fun to play with inside an aquarium or the pool. Looks like real sub too.

All great except the price for such solution.

The plural of Lego is Lego bricks. Never shall legos be spoken. Grr :)

I appreciate the submarine however.

That’s not how language works, but nothing wrong with trying to slow its progress…

In that case I declare that we should in future call NASA spaceships Nasas.

That's not how language works, but you can declare anyhthing you like :)

Reminds me of why I instantly agreed with Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations

I didn't see any bricks in this build. Plenty of Technic beams, though. :)

This is the level of pedantry I can truly appreciate as a software engineer :)

Technics?

Technically, the singular is also Lego brick, not Lego. But people do it "wrong" all the time anyway. Maybe with the raising competition, people will start calling them just brick or block, not just by the company-name.

"legos" is an acceptable plural to "Lego bricks". Language evolves with common usage. Colloquially, the overwhelming majority of people refer to a brick as a "lego" and bricks as "legos".

Devolves…

How did it communicate underwater?

Same as any other rc sub, I'd presume

Radio control will work in a pool. High angle helps and lower frequency transmitters work better than high (so 75MHz, not 2.4GHz). Salt water would absorb radio transmission so results would be much worse in ocean or salt water pool.

Very cool! I did not know fresh water would propagate radio signals.

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