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Telemetry/Video over 4G/LTE Cellular link for Beyond-LOS Flight

Posted by Hunter Parris on April 16, 2013 at 8:42pm

I have a thought to use cellular technology to pipe video and data over a UDP connection. This is nothing, however, I haven't seen a lot of support for the usage of 4G/LTE which allows up to 100mbps speeds. Has anyone ever read up on this pico board? I'ts available from min-box.com. The same place I received my mini-PC for my GCS.

I had this idea about hosting a UDP server on board the aircraft with this pico board. Then routing all traffic through a VPN tunnel where it will be connected to the GCS via internet/VPN tunneling.

The APM will connect to the board via serial I/O. The tricky part (for me) will be routing that serial traffic over a UDP connection. Any idea a simple(r) way to do this with Linux instead of any software-based routing procedures? I very familiar with Linux, just haven't done any network routing inside a client-only environment.

Any thoughts or concerns are more than welcome!

4g, telemetry, video, link, wireless

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Comments

Tommy Larsen May 5, 2013 at 2:34pm

Here is my Solution :)

http://www.diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/skywalker-x8-video-and-tele...
Tommy Larsen April 22, 2013 at 12:03pm

Yes John, the Pi has it's weaknesses. But there are other small Linux devices with Quad 1.7Ghz and lot of power compared to the Pi.
John April 20, 2013 at 5:12pm

Tommy I am looking forward to a blog writeup on your setup. I think I might go a very similar fashion.
Tommy Larsen April 20, 2013 at 8:56am

@John: It's not complicated at all. My 3g router is smaller and lighter than an Android and my serial2wifi PCB is very small and light. I also want to use my GoPro Hero2 as cam and i cannot see how i can connect this to an Android for streaming. My solution is simple and stable :-)
Hunter Parris April 19, 2013 at 11:49am

3G is what I meant...you guys got the idea.
Hunter Parris April 19, 2013 at 11:49am

Using 4G should increase data throughput better than 4G. Experimenting with FaceTime, I noticed the latency is FAR less than it used to be. I will give this a shot, while staying on the Verizon network, and report back my findings. Thank you for all the info gents!
Mike T April 18, 2013 at 10:06pm

can you actually fly fpv with a 300ms lag? that seems pretty dangerous
Tommy Larsen April 18, 2013 at 3:06am

For a long time i have been using a Raspberry Pi with a USB video capture device (Terratec Grabby) connected with my Hero2 to transcode the SD video into 352x288 10fps at 500kbit and it works very good over 3g network with a latency of around 300ms. I have a wifi adapter in my Raspberry Pi and connect this to a 3g wifi router onboard. I also connect to APM2.5 via the same link. I'm working on a blogpost to describe mye setup :-)

Tommy
SaadT April 17, 2013 at 11:03am

Bryan,

Interesting stuff about the DM368. I have been looking at the Z3 module you mentioned as well. Unfortunately its a little expensive for me to buy, at the moment..so will have so save some more. Can you tell me if you built a daughter board to interface the module to a camera? What camera are you using and what's the interface between the camera and the Z3 module?

Also, an odd question..how easy or difficult is it to work with video encoding/decoding with the DM368? :)

Regards,
Saad
Tommy Larsen April 17, 2013 at 3:13am

BTW: I'm already running my aircraft via 3g. Both video and telemetry.