Essentially I am looking to build a remote controlled car using dc motors and one arduino uno to be on the car to supply the power logic and i wanted to use another arduino to be the remote. I was curious what the most effective method would be as to pairing these two devices in a way that it would provide the maximum range possible while still maintaining a decently high bandwidth limit. The reason for this is hopefully i can have the arduino mounted to the car connected to a camera where the camera would send a video feed over to the remote control. I was thinking about using a bluetooth module between the two such as a HM-10 but i wouldn't be able to send a video feed this way because bluetooth cannot transmit that much data at once. However if that is the most practical option i can get over the fact of not having a live video feed and send an image ever 5 seconds or so instead of live. Appreciate any insight on what the most effective method would be in terms of efficiency between range and data stream bandwidth.
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i would stick with analog video broadcasting for now, and keep an eye out for faster wifi modules– dandavisCommented Mar 5, 2017 at 12:55
2 Answers
You wouldn't be able process (acquire, store, resize, output) any sensible video signal with the Uno (or any other Atmega-based board). The amount of memory and clock speed is way too low. Peripherals and instruction set are also lacking - no DMA, FPU, DSP instructions. Arduinos barely cope with audio - any kind of video is out of question, except if you want something like a 5fps 32x32 raw feed. Uncompressed, of course.
If you want another hobby-friendly open source solution, I'd look at something with at least an ARM M4 core, with DMA of course. For communication, regular IEEE 802.11 Wifi is your best bet (high throughput) - those 433Mhz RF modules only transmit 4800bps or so.
There may be better solutions, but I've only used stm32f429 for video: they have DMA(2D), display interface (RGB, 8080 memory interface, ...), DCMI (digital camera interface). Wifi could be handled by something like WifiMCU.
You could use the STM32F429DISCOVERY board with LCD for you remote controller, another STM32F4 board with a camera (ex http://hackaday.com/2014/12/04/serial-camera-courtesy-of-the-stm32f4/) and pair them with two WifiMCUs, if You want to do it with off-the-shelf boards.
You can use raspberry pi and computer to send commands and receive video feed
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i was looking to utilize just Arduinos as I'm looking to get more familiar with the architecture Commented Mar 5, 2017 at 8:33
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@A.Epstein - you might be hoping to, but that will not work. This answer is so far the only remotely sensible one that has been posted. Digital video really requires substantial memory buffers to do right, and no MCU, Arduino or otherwise, has those - the only cost effective solutions going to be those that use a variation of DRAM technology, which isn't something that ends up on the same die as a processor, hence either a stacked assembly like a pi or an S/DD/RAM next to an SoC or special function type CPU.. Commented Apr 5, 2017 at 0:26