It took 4 days of painful work, but i finally got there. I consider this the base for my UAV experience. The transmission is incredibly stable, the video is really smooth. Here is what i used:

-Logitech C920, a good quality camera.

-Pandaboard: has an embedded video encoder that can take the raw YUYV video from the camera and encode it in h264. You can set the encoding quality/bitrate and other parameters.

-HSDPA usb dongle; 60 hours of high speed connection for 10€/month, i have a 2Mbps upload speed with this little beast. Ping increases during workload and reaches 250ms, when unused, it's as low as 50ms.

-The traffic is sent from the pandaboard to a VPN i connect with my client. This is only a way to bypass firewalls.

864x480 works but it's not as smooth as 360p, and i consider the 360p streaming to be more than enough for this. 1280x720 lags considerably.

If there is interest maybe i can publish my code and a video of how it works. Anyway, i'm a happy guy and i wanted to share it. I've never tried radiofrequency video transmission, but was worried about the range.

Now, i don't have to worry about it anymore ;)

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  • I am trying to do the same with raspberry, but it dosnt see dongle as 3g modem,, it see as storage. Can you help?

    thanks

  • Nice setup, but why not encoding to H264 using the camera processor ?

  • We have just launched a digital FPV solution utilizing a cellular network using similar hardware on Indiegogo:

    http://skydrone.aero/fpv-indiegogo

    You might also want to check out our blog entry on diydrones.

  • Here are the scripts i use.
    Nothing special, but they works.
    Yes, i'm using the pandaboard ducati hardware encoder.

    script.tar.gz

  • Good job.!!!! Like others I'd like to see how it work in sources. Did you used gstreamer with plugins for TI Omap DSP?

  • Great stuff! I hear that mobile phone towers are quite directional and pointed down. Would be good to see how this goes in the air! Unlimited FPV range!
  • This is some great work! I'd love to be able to see the code for that, although I'm far away from being able to use it at the moment.


  • :)

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