How to open custom video source from different IP

Ground Control Software Tower
1

Hello,

I am trying to add a video stream from a Raspberry Pi camera mounted on a Solo.
I thought Tower would be great for this since it can open gStreamer streams.

The problem is the Raspberry Pi has a different IP address than the Solo, so the Tower app won’t load the video.

Once I shut down Solo, video from the RPI starts appearing on screen, but when I connect to Solo it disappears again.

Do you have any idea how I can make Tower display the video from the RPI while Solo is running?

Thanks in advance

2

You’ll will need to provide a bit more info on your network topology. Also set Tower to show ‘custom’ video and that should help. Your command on the RPi should send to the correct IP:PORT address of Tower. Post what it is.

3

Hello Bill!

Thank you for the prompt response.
I got it working thanks to this post by Kaizu

My network topology is: Solo controller creates access point. Solo, RPI and Mobile device connect to the hotspot.

4

I’ve quoted it here for completeness. Thx

TowerImage.png750×421 336 KB

I am reporting how to stream Raspberry pi camera video to Tower video widget.

On the last weekend, I attended a drone meeting. I brought my IRIS which was given from my friend. It flew well and I was very satisfied with my first flight. In the meeting, other people brought their brand new drones like SOLO,  Phantom, and Inspire. I had a chance to fly them and I felt something was missing in my old IRIS. It was FPV! I live in Japan and because of a regulation, we can't use a 5.8GHz video transmitter without a licence. Furthermore, SOLO costs twice as in USA. However, I noticed a video widget(small screen) in Android "Tower" app and it was said that it receive custom video streaming.   In that article, the author used Ubuntu as the source. Since I had a raspberry pi 2 with pi camera, I had tried to use it as a FPV camera server. The followings are how to set up video streaming. I hope it will work with your environment.

1. Set up raspberry pi for streaming video

From the shell type the commands in the following post or clone a repo. to execute the srcript

Install gstreamer and enable hardware h264 encoding with gstreamer on the Raspberry Pi

2. Enable a camera module

Type

$ sudo raspi-config

From the menu, Select "Enable camera" and then select "Enable".

If you already did it. You can move to the next step.

3. Start streaming

$ raspivid -n -t 0 -w 640 -h 360 -fps 24 -b 6000000 -o - | gst-launch-1.0 -e -vvvv fdsrc ! h264parse ! rtph264pay pt=96 config-interval=5 ! udpsink host=192.168.3.11 port=9000

You should configure an address of the host and port. The address is the clients(an android tablet)' IP address. You can change port number. You can change the resolution of the video -w: wide -h: height. There are so many parameters to control the video format.

4. Show video on Tower widget

Please follow the instruction here.

You need to set the port number as same as the one specified above.

You only have video while connecting to your pixhawk. 

Now you can watch a flight data and video footage on a same screen as the latest drones!

On Wifi network, latency was not unbearable. I hope to install a raspi on my IRIS soon.

In a future, I would like to use 4G/LTE network for telemetry and video streaming. 

note: The current supply of the usb ports of a raspberry pi is limited. It is better to supply external power to wifi or 4G/LTE usb dongle or the system may hang up soon or later.

You may need to install rpicamsrc

Thanks!