Happy new year diydrones community, I wan't to give you a bit of real-life footage of OpenFPV.

The footage is recorded on the ground station via screen capture to give you a more realistic feeling.

I had not transmissions problems in 15 minutes flight time. Radius about 150 - 300 meters.
The footage is not modified (except cropped).

I started with the lowest resolution and will increase it over time and keep you updated with the results.

The video conversion and yt upload decreased the quality a bit compared to the original footage.

Facts:
- DJI F450 Stock
- 640x480
- 30 FPS
- 160° Lens
- Odroid-W
- FPV Battery lifetime 1h 30min
- 5.8 GHz Wifi

Last post: OpenFPV Update 2 - Roadmap for 2015, Oculus Rift Support, 5GHz

First post: Open Source FPV Project - OpenFPV

I have worked hard in my sparse time to improve OpenFPV. I got a lot of mails from interested people around the world and can't wait to share the latest results with you. Your support is amazing, and my goal is to bring this project alive as soon as I can. Special thanks for all who donated a few bucks to the Project, every dollar helps me a lot.

A quick overview from the last month:

• MinIMU-9 v2 Gyro, Accelerometer, and Compass test integration
• Further latency optimisation
• 160° Wide Angle Fish Eye Camera
• 5 GHz transmission tests
• Oculus Rift DK2 Support (experimental)
• 720p at 40 FPS Tests
• Source code re-structure
• Optimised video rendering

Pro:

• The gyro integration works pretty good so far
• Telemetry overlay works well with the gyro
• The gyro data transmission works even if the video feed is broken (separated data channels)
• The latency is is now stable over hours and pretty promising
• The wide-angle camera does the job pretty good, nothing else to say
• The new 5 GHz (diversity) adapter gave me really good results and is affordable (20 € each)
• The Oculus Rift was mind blowing - The image is that big that I'm not able to describe
• The source code is now better structured and modularised
• 720p (1280x720) works good on the ground, not tested in the air

Con:

• The CPU Load is to high on the ground station (20% / 400%, 640x480 H264, 2.3 GHz I7, MacOS)
• No hardware decoding for the video stream
• No Telemetry data for the oculus at the moment
• No Fragment shader for Oculus Rift distortion

• Bad weather in Germany

The Roadmap for 2015:

1. Between January and February I will release a first access to the project. This version should be stable enough for testing.
2. Between May and June I will release a updated version with improvements from the community
3. I target August 2015 as a first "release*".

* what means release:

• Easy to install
• Documentation
• Download a Ready To Fly image for the raspberry
• Maybe sell a complete setup online (amazon)

(Please note that all dates are in subject to change, depending on issues, bugs, time)

Some pictures from the lab:

Me holding a prototype with 5Ghz diversity, 160° fish eye camera. I can even write messages on my phone trough the oculus live feed with this setup. Can't show you how it looks like, but all who tested it in my lab are amazed.

Screenshot from the oculus mode. *Note the missing fragment shader for the rift distortion, this is not 3D (but possible in the future, you will see a huge 2D screen in front of you)

The prototype with attached 5Ghz adapter watching birds.

I have no in flight footage yet, the main reason is the bad weather here. But I will do some recordings, pictures if the weather is a bit better and I have enough time and a working drone / plane*, you have my word.

* My last plane crashed and destroyed one OpenFPV Setup while testing

TL;DR;

- First release for developers between January and February 2015

- First "consumer" release summer 2015 (maybe later)

If you have any questions, please leave a comment below or write me: contact@openfpv.org

Regards,

Tilman

I saw this Raspberry Pi clone today the first time and will definitely try it in september. A lighter, smaller alternative to the rpi.

From the description:

ODROID-W is a miniature computing module which is fully compatible with all software available for the Raspberry-Pi.

The W stands for: - Wearable device development
- Widely applicable Internet of Things (IoT) development
- Workable DIY electronics prototyping

http://www.hardkernel.com/main/produc...

A map represents areas where it is not recommended to fly drones due to regulations.

https://www.mapbox.com/drone/no-fly/#10/37.3663/-121.8027

Hey guys,

a long time passed since the last update from OpenFPV.

Thank's to the community for the great feedback and special thanks to all people around the world who wrote me feedback mails, joined the project or donated money. I really appreciate your interest about the project.

It was very silent the last month about the project, the reason is very simple:

I do not want to ship crappy unusable software.

My vision for OpenFPV:

OpenFPV should be a simple intuitive application for all desktop platforms. Easily extendable, stable, well designed. And easily extendable was the biggest challenge. Do you want beat around with C++? Do you want build your GUI with Qt?

Imagine you can create a dedicated data channel on TX side with python and receive the data on RX side with simple JavaScript. Layout your UI with HTML5 Elements. If you want to go deeper, why not edit the GStreamer pipe by your own. Without recompiling the whole application. Create your telemetry module in no time.

The trouble:

It was insanely difficult to get the video played back inside the webkit browser engine without adding delay to it. It is not possible to do it with HTML Video, Flash, WebRTC. The biggest challenges are buffer settings. Event Flash cannot display the video fast enough (and this is the most stable technology for live streams inside a browser) for serious FPV flying. My OpenFPV workspace directory is full with prototypes, ideas, and more prototypes. After month of fighting with myself and my vision I came to a deadly simple idea. Convert the H264 stream to a format like MPEG-1 and decode it with JS.

Maybe you think: "What the ... ?"

Don't worry, that was my first though too. I started to write a MPEG-1 decoder with JS until I stumbled upon a unpopular project on github which is doing exactly this job. After integrating all the GStreamer pipelines, transcoding, sockets and web sockets and this library, I displayed the fist output inside the browser. Without high CPU load and a good quality. And the best thing: Without a noteworthy additional lag. Sometimes the simple Ideas are more difficult then the complex ones.

Demo:

I created from this Iron Bird the first prototype. And I decided to give you guys a little update about the project. I am excited about your thoughts and ideas.

- Tilman

I started an open source project to make FPV with the raspberry pi easy to use for every one and wanna invite developers to join. At the moment it is not available for download.

Current Features:

• Recording
• Web interface
• Low-Latency H264 Streaming (≈120ms)
• RESTful API
• Customizable
• Extendable
• Installer (in progress)
• Minimal bettery consumption

Roadmap:

• Invite more people to join the development team
• Complete the installer
• More field tests with different setups
• Create desktop applications for mac/win with HUD support
• Add OculusVR support

If you are interested in the project please let me know, if you want to contribute to the project please contact me: contact@openfpv.org

The project website is http://openfpv.org

I will post updates about the project status in the future.

How the system embedded control panel looks like in the moment:

Thanks to every one who providing blog posts around this topic, especially

Philip from diydrones.com with his great article: http://diydrones.com/xn/detail/705844%3ABlogPost%3A1433488

who gave me the initial input to start it. Philip I invite you to join OpenFPV.