PRISM

Team: Carter Owens

Project

Prism is a digital FPV drone video transmission system, it aims to bridge the gap between high latency, high quality and low latency, low quality systems

  • Many existing digital FPV systems prioritize either quality or latency, PRISM aims give that choice to the pilot by providing two transmission modes
  • PRISM should be the best of both worlds, providing the benefits of both types of system without forcing pilots to choose one and locking them into that choice

System

System Diagram

Methods

  • Prism consists of two Raspberry pi single board computers connected to Realtek WiFi chips, the transmitter also has a camera connected
  • The WiFi chips are placed in monitor mode to allow for arbitrary packet injection
  • The software stack coordinates between the WiFi chips and the the camera/video output,

Conclusion

  • The implementation needs more work to bring latency down to desired range
  • The results could be improved through better camera stack implementation and improved CPU core utilization
  • With more time PRISM could become widley used in the FPV sphere
  • This project taught me a lot about embedded development and developing software for linux
  • In the future, I would like to improve latency and frame time, as well as improve intercomunication with the flight controller.