The idea for the Chub View came from a reluctance to spend the exorbitant asking price for the Aqua View underwater camera/monitor system. My design goals where to build a rugged portable system intended for uses while ice fishing Michigan Lakes and constructed of both off the self components and 3D printed features. As per usual the function of the system and it’s usefulness while ice fishing where paramount however in the end significant time has been spent encasing the system in a somewhat pleasing form. After all, if you expect to stare at something for countless hours on a frozen lake it would be nice if it didn’t look like the south end of north bound rino.

The heart of the Chub View V2 system is the Miniature TTL Serial JPEG Camera with NTSC Video and the NTSC/PAL (Television) TFT Display – 3.5″ Diagonal, both of which are available on the wonderful Adafruit site. There is a lot to love about these two components in this application. First, they can be connected directly to one another and, without the need for additional microcontrollers we can get instant streaming video (as we are in V2 of this project). However, the camera has built in image capture and motion detection and the NTSC screen has both AV1 and AV2 inputs. That means that we have room to expand this version of the design with the addition of a PI Zero and leverage motion detection/ alerting, image capture/replay functions, as well as WiFI streaming (tentatively sketched out for V3).

This version of the project focuses on creating a mobile enclosure above water components as well as a waterproof capsule for the underwater camera with at least 30 feet of useable depth range.