After all the time, work, and money I've put into this plane, its now complete and I'm supposed to go open the throttle and throw it at the sky?!?!?! That seems like a might risky thing to do! LOL
I lost the first plane I was building, I was testing the APM with the regular 915MHz telemetry radios, just getting ready to add a RPI and cellular, and lost it over thick woods. The undergrowth is so thick it's unpassable in many places. I searched for hours, took another plane with a recording camera and flew searches overhead, but I never found it. I guess it'll stay there as long as the woods are there. I believe what happened was that on the previous landing, the airspeed sensor's pitot tube got dirt in it and was causing a low airspeed reading. When I switched to autopilot, it immediately put the nose down to gain airspeed because of the false reading. I saw it start descending and tried to switch back to manual but I wasn't fast enough, it hit the trees far away.
So now I have version 2 ready to go. It's a Flitetest Versa wing with a fuselage strapped to it, so I have room for all the gear. It has an RPI 2, a Pixhawk, a C920 webcam on a simple pan/tilt servo mount, and a T-mobile ZTE Z915 mobile hotspot. The hotspot connects to the RPI by USB cable, so I can turn the wifi off. I'm using the Motion program to stream video over UDP so I can display it in the Mission Planner HUD, and of course a TTL-Ethernet converter for telemetry.
I'm running another RPI at my house as an OpenVPN server, wired in to my home Verizon FIOS network.
So the plane opens a VPN connection through the ZTE hotspot to the OpenVPN RPI at my house. I connect my laptop to my cell phone's mobile hotspot function, and connect it also to the OpenVPN RPI. Connect Mission Planner through UDP, then right click on the HUD in mission planner and set MJPEG source to the plane's VPN address and port. I have a Saitek ST290 joystick set up in Mission planner. Since the Versa wing doesn't have a rudder, I set up the twist grip rudder on the joystick to pan the camera, and I set up a couple of buttons to switch flight modes on the Pixhawk.
Lag time on the video is around 1 second I think. It will do for high altitude cruise mode I guess. It was not easy getting all of this to work together, without the instructions and comments from @Sinamics and @Chuckster1 I never would have figured this out on my own, or even been inclined to try.
So now I just need the courage to go fling this thing. I will go try it tomorrow if the wind is decent, at the same field where #1 was lost. And oh yeah, last but not least I bought one of the GPS trackers that Bernt and Chuckster mentioned, so now I stand a decent chance of at least getting back some pieces of it.
