node-dronestream

Get a realtime live video stream from your Parrot AR Drone 2.0 straight to your browser.

Requirements

You'll needs a decent a decent and current browser and some cpu horsepower. This code uses web-sockets and the incredibly awesome Broadway.js to render the video frames in your browser using a WebGL canvas.

How it works

The drone sends a proprietary video feed on 192.168.1.1 port 5555. This is mostly a h264 baseline video, but adds custom framing. These frames are parsed and mostly disposed of. The remaining h264 payload is split into NAL units and sent to the browser via web sockets.

In the browser broadway takes care of the rendering of the WebGL canvas.

Status

For this release I was exclusively interested in the lowest possible latency. There is no error handling for the websockets, the connection to the drone or the video player what-so-ever. This may come eventually, or may not. I think it is enough to be used as a starting point for your own integration.

Thanks

• Triple high fives to Felix 'felixge' Geisendörfer for getting the whole NodeCopter movement started and being extremely helpful in the process of getting this together.

• André 'zoddy' Kussmann for supplying the drone and allowing me to keep hacking on it, even when he had to cancel the NodeCopter event for himself.

• Michael Bebenita, Alon Zakai, Andreas Gal and Mathieu 'p01' Henri for the magic of Broadway.js

• Johann Phillip Strathausen for being a great team mate at NodeCopter 2012 Berlin.

• Brian Leroux for being not content with the original solution and for cleaning up the predecessor, nodecopter-stream.

0.1.0 / 2012-10-20

• Initial version, unreleased

0.2.0 / 2012-10-20

• released as npm package dronestream

1.0.0 / 2012-12-15

• add support for multiple browser clients
• add support for browser reloads
• reconnect to drone on failure
• add support for bare http sockers
• remove express dependency
• export as a module
• added examples for using in other applications

1.0.1 / 2012-12-16

• update documentation
• add changelog

1.0.2 / 2012-12-27

• use requestAnimationFrame() for rendering video frames
• cleaned up express example
• update ar-drone and buffy dependencies to latest versions

1.0.3 / 2013-03-19

• add custom drone ip to server options
• fix static files on webserver

1.1.0 / 2013-08-07

• add support for custom host and port to client
• support passing an existing video stream
• switch to grunt for building
• express fixes
• remove constants for strict mode
• bump ws and ar-drone dependencies
• add hook for postprocessors

1.1.1 / 2013-08-31

• use cleaned up version of broadways avc.js, fixes errors about 'clip'
• switch to ardrone 0.2.0