How a Deep Sea Camera Servo Drive Endures Extreme Pressures
Designing the right servo drive for camera motion in deep sea explorations meant the drive had to experience extreme pressures up to 8,800 psi.
Edited by EE Staff
Cool Stuff
Dec 2, 2025
At 6,000 meters below the surface of the sea, pressures can reach 8,800psi. The Titanic is only 3,800 meters below the surface. Equipment, such as the camera motion device, used at that depth often has to be encased inside a thick sealed container. When the customer approached ADVANCED Motion Controls (AMC) about using their servo drives without a sealed container, the customer suggested an alternative approach—submerging the electronics in a non-conducting oil bath. After speaking with AMC’s applications engineers the customer was encouraged to “give it a try” even though AMC had never tested their devices at the required depths.
The customer purchased a standard DigiFlex servo drive and performed high-pressure testing of the device while submerged in the oil bath. The drive held up considerably well except that the standard electrolytic capacitors (shaped like small cans) were being crushed by the pressure. The customer’s solution during the testing process was to drill a small hole in the capacitor housing and allow the oil to equalize the pressure. This worked perfectly for the prototype but as a manual modification would be costly and inefficient in a production setting.
After some design considerations, the AMC applications engineering team provided a custom solution using high-pressure tolerant, solid-state capacitors, which could easily handle the pressure naturally and without needing additional modification. For feedback, the customer proposed incorporating a magnetic encoder chip, which required a magnet on the rotating shaft and a sensor chip positioned precisely above it. The AMC team chose to design a custom daughterboard that the drive could plug into. The daughterboard held the sensor chip in perfect alignment with the motor shaft magnet—solving the mechanical difficulty of alignment and saving the customer from having to build their own brackets—reducing the mounting footprint. The customer required that the main communications between the drive and the host was set up using standard RS-232.
Through a committed approach to make the design work, and by overcoming multiple challenges, AMC was able to work with their customer to produce the perfect solution to a difficult project. The underwater camera became a successful and integral product for undersea explorations.
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