Optimizing our supply chain allowed us to make our Sky Drone FPV 2 system available at a dramatically reduced price, starting from USD 299.- for the Europe/Asia version and 329.- for the US/Verizon version. The previous price was 699.-.
Sky Drone FPV 2 is a HD camera system for drones that transmits over the LTE network providing an unlimited range and low latency video+data link.
Digital High Definition Video
The Sky Drone FPV 2 system uses a high resolution camera with a wide dynamic range. It provides you with an amazing live video feed of up to 1080p at 30fps.
Telemetry and Command & Control Link
Besides the video link, Sky Drone FPV 2 provides a bidirectional data link between your drone and your Ground Control Station. This can be used to visualized telemetry data and/or control the drone. We support the MAVLink protocol as well as any generic protocol that interfaces via RS232/UART.
Unlimited Range
By using existing cellular networks, the Sky Drone FPV system provides you with virtually unlimited range. The only requirement is cell tower coverage. The system is optimized for the 4G/LTE network to provide best video quality and lowest latency. It does however fall back to 3G or even 2.5G networks by automatically adjusting video parameters without interrupting the stream.
Low latency
By using our own highly optimized video processing pipeline, the system is designed for lowest latency video from scratch. The typical end-to-end latency is less than 150ms.
Groundstation Software
The Groundstation to receive Video from the Sky Drone FPV 2 unit runs on Windows and Linux with version for MacOS, Android and iOS in the pipeline to be released in Q2 2017.
Interchangeable Lenses
The Sky Drone FPV 2 system is using high quality lenses that are interchangeable. Instead of locking you to a specific lens, you have the freedom to change the lens for specific use cases (wide angle lens for best overview or narrow FOV lenses for artistic flights with less distortion).
Security
The video stream and meta data are fully end-to-end encrypted making it impossible for third parties to eavesdrop the transmission or interfere with it. Rather than reinventing the wheel, we rely on open and proven standards including Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) and Secure Real-Time Protocol (SRTP) using AES128.
For more information see https://www.skydrone.aero/products/sky-drone-fpv
Comments
Hi Kevin, I have also connected the video fine but cannot get telemetry. Can you remember how you solved the issue on your Pixhawk 2?
@Kevin The bandwidth requirement of the MAVLink stream mostly depends on the messages you enabled and it's update frequency. You can use QGroundControl to tweak it and minimize the required data volume.
All,
After some troubleshooting with SkyDrone, my Pixhawk 2.1 is connected to my GCS through the 4G connection. It eats up around 1MB of data every 5 minutes or so, which is quite respectable.
I'll see how it does when I refit my boat in a few weeks.
Tuning the video feed quality from RC or GCS would be excellent! HD feed is not needed when navigating.
1.2 GB for 20 minutes? Ouch -- that could get expensive very quickly. Def. need the ability to dynamically control bitrate from GCS.
Cool, that would be great! Can we also get an option to turn the video stream on and off to save data?
@Kevin Good to hear that you have the system running. The video bitrate adjusts to network conditions but might go a bit high for certain applications under ideal network conditions. We are aware of that and will have a GCS software update where you can manually set an upper limit available very soon.
Connected and video is up and running on my data plan. No issues there other than opening up the specified port in my firewall. Video has great speed, it just eats up around 1MB of data every second which is a bit high for me. I'll connect it to my Pixhawk 2.1 tomorrow and see how it does.
@Johm @Auturgy We indeed use a Rpi3 in the product and we are not trying to hide it. It just is not relevant to mention, as some customers might conclude the system is meant for tinkering - which it is not. Rather than using Raspbian or similar OS, we use a small custom embedded linux system optimized for the task. No UI, no packet manager and other unnecessary stuff. But therefore the system is fast-booting and very stable. Our previous system ("Sky Drone FPV 1") was actually in-house developed hardware with custom PCBs etc. - but we ran into many issues, particular sourcing issues that delayed the product and availability. (seehttps://www.skydrone.aero/blogs/news/the-sky-drone-journey-since-in...). As our main expertise is the software, we are now focusing on that and have a much more mature product with Sky Drone FPV 2.
Regarding the camera - we are using a USB connection to the camera but - as John suspected - are not using a standard UVC protocol but a custom solution to have more leverage on tweaking encoding parameters on the fly.
We decided not to use the pi camera as the image quality for video (especially in low light situations) is not that good. The sensor we use only has 3 Megapix (rather than the 8mpix for the Pi) - but as we do not use it for still images it provides a much better video quality.
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