My UAV project in the works.

Hello all, newcomer here. I've been cobbling together some (mostly off the shelf) components together to make a FPV system, at least initially. Later on I plan on adding more goodies to get to "UAV" status, but for now it's all good.


Pictured is the mostly completed ground station, and some of the vehicle-side stuff.


The ground station consists of an Arduino mega, an SFE joystick shield, a Nokia 6100 LCD, and a cheap 4800 baud wireless serial modem, which is hidden behind the LCD. I plan on replacing the serial modem with an Xbee pro soon, but the TX/RX pair was only $10 total, so I figured it'd work for inital debugging and testing.


The plane components here are another arduino, with the wireless RX, elevator and rudder servos, and a 4DS TTL-level camera.


Everything works well, except for the camera. Hooked directly to the mega at 57600 baud and lowest RAW resolution, I averaged about 0.5 fps to the screen. I don't even what to think about what it would be like over a 4800baud connection, let alone an Xbee a hundred feet in the air. My question thus is - what would a good NTSC-output camera be, and what would be a good transmitter and receiver unit for that camera? The Xbee I plan on getting is 2.4ghz, so I would need something that would not interfere with that. Thanks!

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Comments

  • Scotty:

    I had initially hoped I would be able to do exactly that, but the main limitation I found was the pictures the serial camera takes are just too big to even process on the same arduino, much less transmit over a serial link. I have since switched to a more conventional NTSC camera with separate receiver and transmitter.
  • interesting...
    how are you getting the camera to transmit through the duemilanove to the mega?
    is the camera sending serial data?
  • i have seen both 5.6ghz and 900Mhz wireless TX/RX combos for around 70 bucks. And what are you using for radio control? with 2.4Ghz xbees you will have to go FM
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