Marine Rush pt.1: Creating a remote-controlled boat using a radio frequency module for wireless connectivity and a Custom built thruster

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So I've been thinking of all the kinds of rc vehicles we can build as tech enthusiasts. RC bots, drones and planes find a really common place. I thought of creating rc marine-based vehicles and then building activities and games around them. I am naming this series: Marine Rush. This is the first part, an RC ship(obviously 🥴). This is about the building of it, you'll find the link for its code within the article.


The Body

We start by building the body for our ship. After spending weeks trying out different materials, we and to PVC. If you need to, here's a reel demonstrating our material hunt journey. After getting fairly long 4'' diameter pipes, we cut them vertically and flattened them by heating with a heat gun. after obtaining sheets from the pipes, we cut it into pieces according to a pre-planned design(which we picked up off-of the internet😁) , and put them together to form our ship. Watch our building process here.

Here's a pic of our final ship in water: 




The Thruster

The next obvious step we was to find a way to propel it in water. What most people we found on the internet did was to take a propeller fan, put it on a motor and use a rudder to steer their vehicle. But I thought of doing something different( 'cuz why not😛). At first, I thought of putting up a pipe attached to high pressure water jet and steering the pipe right and left using a mg995 servo motor to change the ship's direction. As it turned out, we couldn't find a jet powerful enough to push out boat, at least as far as we cared to look before landing on to the idea of making a thruster completely of our own. So we looked up on the internet and found 3D files for a propeller. We printed it and also designed and printed a case to fit in a BLDC motor, jammed it all together and voila.... We'd made a thruster completely on our OWN (And that too within a night). 

Here's one of the various 3D prints we took of the propeller: 


Also, watch the clip we took when we first tested the thruster in water: 

The Final Ship

After all those long and tedious tasks, we finally put everything together: fit an mg995 servo motor into the base of the ship and fit our thruster to rotate it. We used the nrf24l01+ module with an SMA connector for an antenna to control the ship wirelessly. We designed an 3D printed the remote's body and traced down the circuit on a zero-pcb. Here's how the finalised remote and boat pair look like: 


We tested out the boat by driving it in a swimming pool near our college and also took it to the motorboat competition held at the annual fest of LNMIIT(plinth 2025) where we got disqualified for exceeding the time limit. Here are some clips of it:

Check out more content on this ship, and also about our LNMIIT expedition on our channel: Makers' Unfiltered. Also, find the complete code here.





Peace😘

















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