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I just got a drone, although it doesn't have live video streaming, so I got an idea.

I'll attach my pi to the drone, put a $7 webcam on the drone, and stream the webcam to my laptop.

But, that requires an internet connection. So my question is, is it possible I can attach a mini wifi router to the drone? Also to and connect the pi & the laptop to the router? Basically stream to drone with LAN.

Where can I get a wifi router to do this? A mini one. (The drone can hold all of this, it is powerful)

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  • I don't think wifi is viable for drones except within a very limited volume, which might be expandable via repeaters -- but there is no such thing as a super powerful wifi router by way of which you will be able to stream things whilst flying hundreds of feet around.
    – goldilocks ♦
    Dec 25, 2015 at 18:13
  • Related: raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/13315/… Please have a look if the solutions discussed there apply to your question.
    – Ghanima ♦
    Dec 25, 2015 at 21:42

2 Answers 2

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You might want to look into wifibroadcast which uses off-the-shelf WiFi hardware :

Why normal wifi is a bad choice for FPV applications

  • Association: Video transmitter and receiver need to be associated. If one device looses association (for example due to too weak signal strength) the video transmission stops instantly.
  • Error-free transmission: Wifi transmits either data that is correct or no data.
  • Two-way communication: Even if you are sending data only from source to sink a bi-directional data flow is required using wifi. The reason for this is that a wifi receiver needs to acknowledge the received packets.
  • One to one transfers: Unless you use broadcast frames or similar techniques a normal wifi data flow is a one to one connection.

What wifibroadcast makes different

Wifibroadcast puts the wifi cards into monitor mode. This mode allows to send and receive arbitrary packets without association.

Additionally, it is also possible to receive erroneous frames (where the checksum does not match). This way a true unidirectional connection is established which mimics the advantageous properties of an analog link.

Wifibroadcast uses Forward Error Correction to archive a high reliability at low bandwidth requirements. It is able to repair lost or corrupted packets at the receiver.

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You can actually do that with your pi already!

Adafruit has a nice guide here: https://learn.adafruit.com/setting-up-a-raspberry-pi-as-a-wifi-access-point?view=all

As far as signal strength goes, the 802.11b/g/n USB dongles sold at Adafruit are quite good. I was able to get a signal strength of -74dBm through 14 feet of dirt (both dongles were buried in the ground as an experiment): https://www.adafruit.com/product/814

I imagine that through the air they would perform admirably.

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