Here’s the case after my best attempt:
It looks… bad. The paint coat is horrible and full of scratches and the screen is too big.
But worst of all, the screen is not bright enough in direct sunlight. Not even close. I don’t have a photo but after brief testing I’d say it’s unusable.
So I’m pretty disappointing with the result – I ended up with a big, heavy RC system that is too dim to be usable for FPV.
I searched for a week for alternative capacitive touch screens, preferable in the 5-7 inches range but found nothing bright enough under 100 euros.
So after a mild diy depression I got an idea that will solve at lease 3 of the issues – cost, bright screen and the RC size: use my Galaxy Note4 phone as the screen.
The setup will look like this:
- The quad will send video through 2.4Ghz, packet injection (a.k.a. wifibroadcast method) and RC stream through 433Mhz
- The RC will receive both video and RC data and relay them to the phone using another 5.8Ghz wifi UDP connection. The phone will decompress the H264 video using OMX (or whatever is available) and display it with telemetry on top.
- The phone will also act like a touchscreen interface to control the RC/Quad
Basically this is what most commercial quads (like Mavic) are doing. I’m sure the video link is 2.4GHz due to longer range than 5.8 and better penetration and the connection with the phone is done over a 5.8, low power link.
So the next steps are:
- Redesign a smaller case that will accomodate a Raspberry Pi 3, the RC stick and fader + buttons and wifi cards
- Write a quick android application that can connect to the RC and decompress the video stream
- Profit!
DIY 