Newwwwwww QuadCopter!

2014-12-25

My AeroQuad kit came yesterday. It’s a Cyclone frame with an AeroQuad32 control board. Spent most of the day at The Bodgery building it, and got most of the way through the frame build:

The plan is to put a Raspberry Pi on board that can be used for control over WiFi using UAV::Pilot, and also 1080p video.

Along those lines, I’m going back to the old WumpusRover code and getting the video streaming up to snuff. It’s ported to GStreamer1 now (instead of the original GStreamer CPAN module, which compiled against the old gst 0.10). One major item is that on a new client connection, wait for an h.264 keyframe to come down the wire before sending the client anything. There’s flags on the GstBuffer object that can do that, but they’re implemented via C macros that cause some trouble to the Glib introspection-based bindings. I’ll have to write some xs code into GStreamer1 to help support it.

(I feel like a bit of an idiot having my name on the GStreamer1 module on CPAN. With the Glib introspection bindings doing a whole lot of magic, I really have no idea how it works. I was just the one who stepped up to the plate to get it done. If someone came to me directly asking for help, I’d probably have no clue.)