I want to add a camera

[SuperRoach]

An option I wonder about as well is to have the camera in the center or tied in the middle of the crazyflie, hanging off the bottom. The reason being for aerial shots, you'd want to look down anyway, and could make for great footage. I'm not sure how this would affect stability though.

[tobias]

Today I did some further testing of my FPV setup as described earlier. This time I added an 22uH inductor to the power supply line before the camera and now the video quality when flying is a lot better. Almost no distortion . We are getting closer to a good FPV setup. I didn't have any small inductors less then 22uH to try with so that might works as well. Especially if a capacitor is added as well to make a LC filter.

I have modified the code to manipulate the VCC voltage to about 3.1V. This can be done by enabling the STM32 input pin pull-up which can manipulate the PGOOD signal and thus the VCC feedback voltage making the VREG output 3.1V instead. This is not really a viable solution so I suggest exchanging the VREGs on the transmitter and camera to 3.0V variants instead. Also a it is a good idea to have a separate on-off switch for the camera+transmitter as they consume over 170mA power which extends the charging time to almost the double because the USB current is limited to 500mA. The problem then is that the LC filter could generate destructive voltage spikes when using the switch...never a perfect setup...

Ultimate some kind of add-on board might be the best solution, maybe with a buck/boost DC/DC converter to 3.3V and with good filtering that could be enabled/disabled from the firmware.

[SuperRoach]

Posting partially as a bump, and to see how other people are going - Especially Destiny - I'd love to have an undercam for aerial shots as well!

Either of these which have been mentioned earlier:
http://www.fpvhobby.com/226-rtf-1280-gh ... set-2.html
http://www.fpvhobby.com/143-sub-nano-combo-set.html

Seem like they would be wonderful..

[Daniel]

Hello together,

i found these parts and i think they are very interesting because they are light and the consumption is very low... but i have two questions i haven't found an answer in the forum. Is there already software to receive (crazyradio firmware) the video data? And what software can be used to see the transmitted video on the pc?
I'm using the Crazyflie VM.

http://www.fpvhobby.com/180-4-ghz-nano-size-vtx.html
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Free-Shi ... 88023.html

thank you for your help

Greets

Daniel

[tobias]

Most FPV setups are analog and send the video besides the UAV. They work stand alone and only needs to be powered using a camera, a transmitter and a receiver. They are analog because of the low latency which is required by FPV flying. Digital FPV is a completely different thing and we have not seen any really good solutions (AR Drone might be close). We where involved in a master thesis if you want to read more.

The camera in the link actually looks a loot like the one at FPV hobby.

[SuperRoach]

Almost every link seems to forward back to FPV hobby, especially that sub nano kit, which I learned latter transmitted on the same frequency as the control one.

I'm really hoping to build some form of camera onto the Crazyflie asap, and was wondering what you would think of this setup:
http://www.fpvhobby.com/63-1-gram-nano- ... 80tvl.html (75mAh, Camera 1 gm)
transmitter:
http://www.fpvhobby.com/93-200mw-58ghz- ... itter.html (200mAh, 5.8ghz TX, 2.2gm). However, the voltage is listed as 3.3 - 5.5 volt (THERE IS A VOLTAGE REGULATOR INSIDE). Would that be too high?
Total weight: 3.2gm.
Does that seem ok?

Alternatively, this:
http://www.fpvhobby.com/transmitter/21- ... itter.html
3.2v, 70mAh, 1.2gm may be suitable for a TX. Seems suspiciously small though - is there something I'm forgetting here?

RX- Whatever I can find, they seem plentiful because weight isn't a problem here.

I'm more than willing to be a guinea pig and try it out, but if you know of anything obvious that I am doing wrong, please let me know

[tobias]

Have you seen this? You seem to have linked to about the same parts, and it is the parts I have been using in this thread.

The transmitter works fine down to 2.8V but the camera doesn't work well below 2.9V - 3.0V. If you exchange the regulators on the transmitter and camera to something a TPS73130 or similar should work pretty well. You also need a L or LC filter to the camera to filter electrical noise that distort the image.

[SuperRoach]

Thanks very much for your reply!

I'll be sure to document my progress when the parts eventually arrive.

I have not heard of the TPS73130 before, regulators are new to me.

I'll also make a note to read up about L/LC Filter for the camera as you mentioned. The look of the camera in the linked blog video from march - I assume that was without an LC/L Filter attached.

Overall it'll be very exciting to attach it for the first time and to get any kind of signal.
If the camera (75mw) and the tx at 20mw is to believed, 95mw is quite a nice draw.

[absoloodle37]

Looking forward to learning how SuperRoach's FPV plan turns out!

Question for the group:
I've heard the 2.4Ghz range has better transmission for indoor FPV flying. The nrf24L chip provides 126 Channels of 1MHz from 2400MHz to 2525MHz. Would there be a lot of bleedover/interference?

Thanks!

[tobias]

I don't think so and the datasheet of the nRF chip probably states it. As long as the RF channel is placed away from the FPV channel they shouldn't interfere.