DIY wifi-controlled Quadcopter

There are a few projects I have seen with Wifi, although most have used Wifi principally as a very high bandwidth, short distance data feed, for HD video and fancy sensor data. There are also a few Youtube videos, but I cannot say if they are honest or just jokes. Depending on what you want to do, it can be very easy to achieve wifi on a UAV. For example a gumstix with wifi and USB can very easily be attached to an APM. It is trivial to either provide a secure interface, or simply redirect the serial port from the USB to a network port on the gumstix. Then you can use a different serial port or USB on the gumstix to read in MAVlink (from the telemetry port) and stream that back down to the ground. (or combine them, if you want to implement the joystick/MAVlink control into a single duplex stream and save the APM USB. Then you can (best to do this on a separate gumstix) take in video, compress it, and stream it over wifi also, and any other sensor data or lights or fancy stuff you may want to do...

Just some thoughts. I am not certain how easily Arduino supports a full network stack, or wifi with AES, but even if it did, you would not want to try to do any of those things on your flight computer, if only because you would have to virtually re-write the entire software package to hack in a scheduler, ring0, and other network requirements - only to have your UAV drop out of the sky the first time Johnny starts to poke at it with a network fuzzer, because he saw a new wifi cloud pop up in his neighborhood. :)

Look around, you'll see videos of questionable provenance and here on these forums, more well known examples of wifi on UAVs related posts (some are wifi control, some are wifi hacking, some are wifi telemetry, wifi fpv etc) like

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/rc-control-via-wifi-and-iphone

http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/using-wireless-internet80211

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/wifi-xbees-announced

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/wifi-hacking-with-a-radio

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/ardupilot-powered-wasp-drone-s

Also a lot of people, here, and elsewhere blogging about working on the same goal:

http://robotbox.net/users/roboshopz "working on a wifi..."

There was a recent "wing" build, too, that used a PC104 board to compress video, and I think he used wifi, and another college team who I know used wifi for a local, high quality video, and switched to a different method at greater distance for lower quality, higher power transmissions. I didn't find those, but search DIYdrones for wifi, 802.11, gumstix, PC104 and you should turn up more posts and builds and builders who are or have done this.

Happy hacking!

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Michael Pursifull September 15, 2011 at 3:42am

There are a few projects I have seen with Wifi, although most have used Wifi principally as a very high bandwidth, short distance data feed, for HD video and fancy sensor data. There are also a few Youtube videos, but I cannot say if they are honest or just jokes. Depending on what you want to do, it can be very easy to achieve wifi on a UAV. For example a gumstix with wifi and USB can very easily be attached to an APM. It is trivial to either provide a secure interface, or simply redirect the serial port from the USB to a network port on the gumstix. Then you can use a different serial port or USB on the gumstix to read in MAVlink (from the telemetry port) and stream that back down to the ground. (or combine them, if you want to implement the joystick/MAVlink control into a single duplex stream and save the APM USB. Then you can (best to do this on a separate gumstix) take in video, compress it, and stream it over wifi also, and any other sensor data or lights or fancy stuff you may want to do...

Just some thoughts. I am not certain how easily Arduino supports a full network stack, or wifi with AES, but even if it did, you would not want to try to do any of those things on your flight computer, if only because you would have to virtually re-write the entire software package to hack in a scheduler, ring0, and other network requirements - only to have your UAV drop out of the sky the first time Johnny starts to poke at it with a network fuzzer, because he saw a new wifi cloud pop up in his neighborhood. :)

Look around, you'll see videos of questionable provenance and here on these forums, more well known examples of wifi on UAVs related posts (some are wifi control, some are wifi hacking, some are wifi telemetry, wifi fpv etc) like

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/rc-control-via-wifi-and-iphone

http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/using-wireless-internet80211

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/wifi-xbees-announced

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/wifi-hacking-with-a-radio

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/ardupilot-powered-wasp-drone-s

Also a lot of people, here, and elsewhere blogging about working on the same goal:

http://robotbox.net/users/roboshopz "working on a wifi..."

There was a recent "wing" build, too, that used a PC104 board to compress video, and I think he used wifi, and another college team who I know used wifi for a local, high quality video, and switched to a different method at greater distance for lower quality, higher power transmissions. I didn't find those, but search DIYdrones for wifi, 802.11, gumstix, PC104 and you should turn up more posts and builds and builders who are or have done this.

Happy hacking!
3D Robotics

Chris Anderson September 15, 2011 at 3:39am

You'll get better range if you use one that interfaces with traditional RC modules, like the iPhly:

This reply was deleted.

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DIY wifi-controlled Quadcopter

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