Cheap FPV Goggles Turned Pocket Sized Display

September 8, 2018 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

Thanks to the exploding popularity of First Person View (FPV) RC flying over the last couple of years, the cost of the associated hardware has dropped rapidly. Today you can get entry-level FPV goggles for under $40 USD on various import sites. For the money you’re getting a 5.8 GHz receiver, battery, and an LCD display; even if the components themselves aren’t exactly high end, at that price it’s essentially an impulse buy.

[nomand] didn’t necessarily have a use for a cheap FPV headset, but he did like the idea of having a pocket sized display that he could pass off to others so they could see what he’s seeing during flights. So he harvested the principle components from a Eachine VR006 headset and designed a new 3D printed enclosure for them. The final result looks fantastic, and is much cheaper than commercial alternatives on the market.

He’s created an exceptionally detailed step-by-step guide on how you can perform the conversion yourself in the project’s GitHub repository, and has also put together a video where he goes over the modification and discusses the end result. [nomand] clearly intends for this to be a project for others to duplicate instead of a one-off build, and given the price and final results, we wouldn’t be surprised if this conversion becomes popular in FPV circles.

Perhaps the best part of this project is that it requires almost no modification of the original hardware; just soldering two wires because the original connector is too large. Otherwise just need to take the headset apart carefully, and transplant the components into the 3D-printed case [nomand] has meticulously designed. The case is so well designed it doesn’t even need any fasteners, it slides together and everything is held in with some strategically placed pieces of foam.

Between this modification and the custom built spectator display we covered recently, it looks like there’s a clear demand for sub-$50 portable FPV monitors. Seems odd that no manufacture is trying to fill this niche so far.

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Using Arduino For Quadcopter Spectrum Analyzers

January 26, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

First-person-view (FPV) flying, by adding a camera, video transmitter, and video goggles to the meat on the ground, is one of the best ways to experience remote-controlled flight. For just a few hundred dollars, it’s the closest thing you’re going to get to growing wings and flying through the trees of your local park. One of the most popular and cheapest ways to go about this is the Boscam RX5808 wireless receiver – a $9 module able to pull down video from an aircraft over 5.8GHz radio. Stock, this radio module is just okay, but with a few modifications, it can be turned into a very good receiver with a spectrum analyzer and autoscan.

The Boscam RX5808 has three DIP switches to allow for eight different channels for receiving video, and this is where most RC hobbyists stop. But the module also has a very capable SPI interface, and by adding a simple Arduino, the complete capabilities of this receiver can be unlocked.

The core software for the build is [markohoepken]’s rx5808-pro and rx5808_pro_osd, and [crazyheea]’s rx5808-pro-diversity to enable all the capabilities available in the RX5808 receiver. With an off-the-shelf LCD, this mess of wires and boards turns into an auto-scanning spectrum analyzer that’s also able to put video from a drone onto a screen.

[garagedrone] put together a very complete demo video of the entire build. You can check that out below.

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An Extremely Tiny 5.8GHz FPV Transmitter

November 16, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 19 Comments

Flying RC aircraft with a first person view is the latest and greatest thing in the hobby. In a fact that I’m sure will be shocking to 90% of people, you don’t need to buy a Phantom quad fly FPV. The guys at Flite Test show how you can build a tiny 5.8GHz FPV transmitter for under $100.

The parts used for this build are pretty much jelly bean parts at this point, but [Peter] at Flite Test is going for extremely lightweight parts for this build. He found an NTSC board camera that only weighs 1g and added a wide-angle lens. The transmitter is a tiny 200mW module that only weighs about 2g.

Why are the Flite Test crew going for small and light FPV setups? They just launched a new line of planes that can be built from a single piece of foam board. If you have a small micro quad, you can easily add FPV to it with this rig.