From Makezine, a good use of a RaspberryPi board to capture and stream video from a balloon:
PublicLaboratory is a fantastic citizen scientist organization with really useful projects like DIY spectrometers (for finding out what’s really in stuff) and aerial mapping for monitoring of oil spills, landfills, etc. They’ve done some fantastic work using the continuous shooting mode of consumer cameras, including converting them to near infrared. The problem is that there is little or no control over the camera and you need to process the images later.
Craig Versek of PVOS had the idea to use a Raspberry Pi and a webcam to wirelessly stream images back to earth. The Pi is ideal because it’s lightweight and takes relatively little power.Here is a system description and a writeup (with video) of their first launch.
Comments
I'm actually trying to do this myself, not for FPV, just long range 'live' images.
Interesting...I have just started creating exactly this setup for some work I'm doing with the X8 Flying Wing aircraft! Glad I'm not the only one with this idea!
What range are you getting from the dongle, and what is your battery life like?
Are they streaming the images over a 3G/4G network? I've often wondered about doing that for very-long-range FPV. Obviously latency would be a major obstacle to overcome.
wait... did someone say... "pi in the sky"???
A question weighing on my mind is how long those wifi dongles are going to be around. They originated in a time when computers didn't have built-in wifi, but now everything has wifi. The rasberry pi will inevitably have wifi built in, but it's too big to fit on an indoor copter. The dongles are still useful for adding cheap wifi to microcontrollers without paying the huge cost of Roving Networks but the demand for dongles to keep them in production doesn't seem to be there.