Hello,
I am wondering if I could send fpv live feed video to smartphones, if that is at all possible. Or if its possible to have the main ground station able to send video signals and spread it to phones. I am just wondering if that is possible. Thanks for reading.
-Nelson
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Some folks on rc groups have added access point extenders for the clip to get 1000ft range but I'm assuming you're setting up a mini quad, so weigh is the issue, we modified the paralinx for that reason (wiring)...
I just noticed this thread on the main page. FYI, I have a smartphone app on the Google play store that will stream live video from a UAV to an Android smartphone/tablet, and overlay the HUD if you have telemetry. You need a GStreamer source, such as with a Raspberry PI, and a WiFI connection to your UAV. There is also a Windows version.
See my blog here for instructions and a link to the side-load free version.
+1 to @Checkers idea of the Wifi Broadcast software. Basically using a Raspberry Pi + a wifi dongle in what I think is called promiscuous mode. Has anyone seen a project with an ESP8266 doing something like this? That thing is so hackable it is clearly a contender for this type of project. Perhaps a camera with HDMI out (so it is doing the encoding) connected directly to an ESP8266 that just transmits whatever the camera sends it. Then use a computer to decode the whole shebang on the ground side. Latency starts adding up is a big problem here.
When something like this happens for small, light and cheap the hobby will be significantly changed.
I did just that for my first fpv system.
You need:
Plug them together, download the app for the wifi transmitter, connect to the wifi network and you will see the video on your phone/tablet.
I created software to run on a companion computer for the APM that does this (https://github.com/rospilot/rospilot). It's open-source and runs on a single board computer. It transcodes the video to H264 and streams over Wifi. Lemme know what you think!
Please try https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=rcmobile.FPV it sends low rate video stream over 3G/4G and much more other features.
WiDV includes a RTSP server on the video receiver, using the receiver's Ethernet port you could plug a wireless access-point so phones can connect to it using wifi. On the phones you can install any RTSP client like VLC for android to watch the video feed.
Their instructions are here http://wiki.wirelessdv.com/. ( check the "Video streaming server" section )
I hope it helps.
Once you have live video capture on the PC, it's just a matter of making sure the phone can reach the PC (internet or local connection on both) and then encode and stream the video to the phone. Simplest method would be using VideoLAN (VLC) on both ends. But there are many others. Getting a low latency stream going requires more effort and specialized solutions like GStreamer etc.
You can use a EZ grabber USB video capture to get the image from your Video receiver into your PC and you can also pull the video from your video receiver and connect a 802W Wireless WiFi Transmitter to send the video to your phone via a free app.
Tried this combo and it works fine. You do loose resolution but it is dirt cheap and works. You should have a video splitter so you don't add to the video degradation. I had mine going through an EagleEyes setup.
About $20-$30 for the grabber and $30-$50 for the wifi transmitter.
Perhaps take a look at Wifi Broadcast. It uses raspberry pi's and wifi dongles to stream HD video that can be viewed live by a laptop at fairly low latency (130 ms) The laptop could then repeat the stream over a local network/ wifi hotspot etc. :)