3D Drone Video

If you enjoy flying quadcopters, it is a good bet that you’ll have a drone with a camera. It used to be enough to record a video for later viewing, but these days you really want to see a live stream. The really cool setups have goggles so you can feel like you are actually in the cockpit. [Andi2345] decided to go one step further and build a drone that streams 3D video. You can see a video of the system, below.

Outdoors, there’s probably not a lot of advantage to having a 3D view, but it ought to be great for a small indoor drone. The problem is, of course, a small drone doesn’t have a lot of capacity for two cameras. The final product uses two cameras kept in sync with a sync separator IC and a microcontroller, while an analog switch intersperses the frames.

On the viewing side, a USB frame grabber and a Raspberry Pi splits the images again. At first, the system used an LCD screen married with a Google Cardboard-style goggle, but eventually, this became a custom Android application.

The two cameras work best if you can hack them to use the same clock. If you don’t, then one image may appear to roll. This might be less disturbing if you rotate the cameras so that the roll goes right to left instead of up and down. The system introduces about 100 ms of delay which isn’t perfect but is workable, apparently.

Small drones are easy to find, or you can build your own. We’ve seen cameras ganged for 3D before, but never at this small of a scale.

from Hackaday https://ift.tt/2HQcdTB
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