Control PV2 via a data connection

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Ok so this was brought up in another thread and was suggested that I make a new one for this topic. This may sound a little far fetched and a little unreasonable and your going to say it will add extra weight and reduce flight times and so on. but i still wanted to share my findings so far.

Now what if you were out one day and you wanted to get some video from say a long distance but didnt want to compromise a connection loss and losing your phantom.. Now a typical setting with waypoints you would set your waypoint to a distance, lets say, 4 miles. at around 1000ft you are going to lose connection to the extender and all control of the phantom via the app. you have to wait for the phantom to continue on its mission and return home like instructed. so what happens it something goes wrong and it happens to do a fly off or the battery loses its charge or something crazy like the phantoms are know for :lol:
Well not only do you lose the phantom but you have no way of tracking it.

Ok so here is what i have come up with so far.. the other night i was messing around with the wifi settings in the extender and the camera. well I decided since i was bored to just connect to the camera directly from my phone. come to find out i could also do the redirect trick and have internet at the same time. so i had this idea come to me, what if i could some how strap my phone to the phantom and remotely control it via another phone, tablet or computer.. well i have got really close to accomplishing this.

What i have so far is the ability to control one Iphone 5s (that is jailbroken) with my other Iphone 5 (not jailbroken) as if i were looking at the screen and swiping and selecting things. All over a data connection thru my service provider. Now the other question... Is there LAG? yes there is lag, on my connection at work like 8 secs, and sometimes the video wont show up. but its well enough to see the screen and how far the phantom is. What i still have to test is the connecting the Camera directly (since im still at work i cant) to the phone and remote in. So basically i will always have connection to the phantom regardless the distance.

How did i do it?
have a jailbroken phone and download Veency from cydia.
download VNC viewer on the other iphone or device.
setup a VPN at home.. Why? Ill explain that in a min.
Connect both phones to VPN
Run VNC on both phones..
Now you can see the other phone.
connect Veency phone to the camera via wifi
set the ip settings once connected to blank on DNS and router.


Ok so yes you do need to have a jailbroken iphone to get the Veency app. once installed it will allow you to remote in via VNC from any device. I know alot of you have android devices and im not sure on the work around for that but this will give you an idea if you want to try for yourself. Ok so the next this is, this only works if your at home on a wifi connection. Yes your right thats the only way i have got it to work untill now. Setting up a VPN (Virtual Private Network) allows your phone to think that is connected to you home network without even being there. You will have to look up on how to do this, it can be fairly easy if you have a router that supports VPN setup. once you get the VPN setup at home go to both iphones and create a new VPN connection. Genreral>VPN>Add VPN Configuration. input all your credentials and viola your connected to your home network. Now you can go down the road or out of town and still access you home network anywhere you go. Ok so now that you have done this it is a simple as connecting to the other phone by finding the IP address which now should be 192.168.1.XXX. on the Veency device and input that into the VNC Viewer of the other device.

I will add the steps of how to connect the phone to the camera when i get home and actually do it and try it myself. but this give people that find this useful something to try and mess with. I hope that when i get the camera connected it will still let the VPN connection find my home network at the same time keeping a constant connection to the Camera.

On the plus side.. you also have a GPS enabled phone attached that will allow you to be able track your phantom Via the ICloud Find my phone service.

Criticism is welcome, and thoughts are appreciated. I still have alot of testing, but i wanted to see if anyone else would find this useful and if they use it to see what methods you guys try.
 
You won't be able to control the Phantom, so much as the Phantom's camera, right? That's the only thing that you can really control via WiFi. So if your Phantom is off 4 miles away, and decided to do a fly away, you still would have no control (though you'd be able to watch the fun via the camera ;) ... and then be able to track the wayward Phantom via Find My iPhone).

Or is there a way to control the Phantom itself with the Vision app that I haven't found yet?

I love this thinking, and this solution... but I think it'd only be truly useful if you actually have attitude and altitude control.
 
well maybe i worded it wrong but you wouldnt have control as in flying it like you would with the controller.. but setting new waypoints and return to home control you would.Controll the camera and such. I personally dont have a use for this or waypoints but its something for me to play around with and share.

If you were to loose the phantom anyways by loss of power or something you would be able to control it with the remote anyways ya know.

I just found another thread about some doing some some coding with the Camera it self and pulling the feed off a certain port of the camera which is something else that i could try to implement into. if thats the case maybe write an app that talks to the camera and feeds that back to a PC software controling of the camera.
 
Wow, this sounds pretty cool. I don't know a whole heap about wifi and cellphone coverage, but I betchya there's a clever way to achieve controlling via cell coverage. Then the telecommunications companies can start cashing in on service. A 'dropped call' could become a major issue tho lol
 
Well after getting home and getting the phantom out, I can confirm that the connection to the camera directly and with a VPN connection over a 4G data connection did work. Now the lag was a little slow and i think this do to the process of it trying to send all that info over a data connection.. i did notice too that it would not refresh at points too. I could click and set a way point but it would take a bit to refresh the screen. So technically if i ever wanted to send my phantom on a long haul i could and have assurance that i wouldnt loose it and could track its every move remotely over my second phone.

So now my next project is to see if i can get the camera to talk to my home network over the data connection and then for my second phone to talk to the camera thru the app and just use the app as the control instead of a VNC environment. I might have to set up a data server at home and use some sort of IP routing to get the app on my second phone to talk directly to the camera on the first phone.
 

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