Full digital FPV car enhacements
I worked on my 3G data link based FPV car with the Android Smartphone. Improved the following things
- Wide angle lense
- “4 channel” RC transmitter for control input generation
- Automatic reconnect function on both sides, Smartphone and Laptop
The first thing is an optional lense to get view angel of nearly 90 degres. That helps a lot to navigate and control a vehicle with first person view. Another effect is, that the cam gets more light from the environment and that improves also the speed of dark-bright adaption.
The second thing was to find something with which it is easier to control a vehicle than with the mouse pad. An old remote from an xufo is used for that. To get the stick positions an Arduino reads the potentiometer values and send it via FTDI interface to the laptop.
The last was, to improve the software on Smartphone and Laptop a bit. The main thing was to introduce a detection if connection is lost on both sides. If this is the case, the smartphone software try to reconnect and the laptop software informs the user that connection is lost and wait for a new connection.
Now the car is much more controllable, even with a poor 3G data link as you can see on the following video:
