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Hi guys,

I am part of a student project interested in drone development and we were wondering if the crazyflie would be suitable for us. What I would need:

-Connectivity: The drone would need to connect to an android device (smartphone, AR glasses) to stream video feed to it while the drone is in flight, and at the same time control it via touchpad. This seems to be the biggest obstacle so far, as I have not found any wifi support for it. Would this be doable currently at all? I have found a forum page where the ESP8266 deck is mentioned but there is no update on that: viewtopic.php?t=1988

-Camera FPV streaming : A few forum posts were really helpful (viewtopic.php?t=427) but again the comms is an issue.

- Hackability: I will eventually need to add sensors on the drone, eg proximity sensors to sense obstacles. The goal would be an autonomous obstacle avoidance mechanism to prevent collisions as easily.


Thank you very much for your time and assistance!

Hi and welcome!

Digital camera streaming is hard and has latency issues. If you find any good and small solution please share because I don't know any. I don't think ESP9266 can be used for that.

Adding sensors are pretty easy because of the deck port. For obstacle avoidance I recommend the vl53L0 ToF sensor.

Hi,

If you want to stream video from an analog FPV camera to an Android device, you could use the LaserBGC Modular RX adapter (http://laserbgc.com/index.php?route=pro ... duct_id=84).
You would also need a Fatshark compatible RX module (e.g. http://www.getfpv.com/fat-shark-5-8ghz- ... ators.html). The next step would be to implement that the video is shown in the Android control app.

Which brings me to a simple UX problem: at least on a smart phone you would probably block the video display with your fingers when you use touch controls. It might work with a bigger screen (e.g. on a tablet).

As Tobias mentioned, the ESP8266 will most likely be too slow to send a video stream with an acceptable quality and frame rate.

If you could provide some more details about your student project, it would make it easier to answer your questions.

Regards,

Fred