Solo? Yea, its a beautiful machine with some really nice functionality…
How can I make this work on any random rig I want to build, thats cooler than theirs?
Well, this is a bit of a complicated question but removing the abstraction of the frame, motors, and ESC’s, theres the flight controller (Pixhawk2), and then the onboard computer (AKA SoloLink) which accomplishes the following:
- Pushes flight instructions to the FC, and video instructions to the camera
- Forms an 802.11 AP interface with the controller, and
- Ingests HDMI video from a gopro (or reasonable facsimile) & using gstreamer, pushes this across the formed wifi link to an android or iWhatever device
Thats pretty awesome, how do you know all of this?
https://3dr.com/about/open-source/?_ga=1.21198971.1577313034.1469129553 & https://dev.3dr.com/?_ga=1.12088308.1577313034.1469129553
Ive tried looking around for small form factor boards & cant seem to find anything that does HDMI IN ?!?!?!?FTW?!?!?!?
Yea, same here until just recently… http://www.gateworks.com/product/item/ventana-gw5510-single-board-computer
HDMI In, Canbus, not really much on storage, but does wifi by way of a mPCIe slot (Which… if you look around on amazon for laptop upgrades, theres plenty that do 802.11AC that can be found fairly cheap). I would imagine that this (or something close to it) wound up being used as a proof of concept platform for what the solo is built upon?
They have a newer board (the Ventana 5530) which looks more appealing, has more horsepower, has GPS & 9DoF -But lacks HDMI in, canbus, and I2C
Anyways, my question to the community becomes… for purposes of interfacing & communicating with Pixhawk, is canbus the only interface/protocol here or are there other things in play here?