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 ;)
Replies
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
see USB mode switching (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/USB_3G_Modem)
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?
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.
:)