Prebuilt Wifibroadcast Raspberry PI FPV images

This post gives an update to Wifibroadcast: Prebuilt images.

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Since the beginning of Wifibroadcast the only method to try it was to manually install and compile the software. To make it easier for people to try out the system I now created prebuilt images. They can be found here: https://github.com/befinitiv/rpi_wifibroadcast_image_builder/releases

To use them you just have to install the images onto SD cards, prepare two Raspberry PIs with camera+TPLINK TL-WN722 as TX and display+TPLINK TL-WN722 as RX and you are done.

I moved the manual installation procedure from the main Wifibroadcast page to here in case you want to install Wifibroadcast onto an existing Raspberry PI image. Making things by yourself is also a good way to get to know the system better.

The images contain the basic features you would expect. Video capture at TX and video display at RX. Also, automatic video recording onto USB sticks and support for a shutdown button is included. FrSky-OSD software is also installed but disabled by default (since it depends a lot on the hardware available).

Automatic image creation

Since creating these images is quite time consuming (and I am lazy…) I automated the whole process. This also helps me and others to understand afterwards exactly what an image contains. And of course, others can put their tweaks into the build system and benefit as well from all the points above.

The following commands are all you need to do to create the TX and RX images:

hg clone https://bitbucket.org/befi/rpi_wifibroadcast_image_builder
cd rpi_wifibroadcast_image_builder
./build_images.sh

The build_images.sh automatically downloads the needed bits such as basic raspbian images, build tools and kernel. The kernel will be patched, compiled and installed onto the base image. This is followed by chrooting with the help of qemu (because Raspberry PI is an ARM architecture) into the image and (natively) install Wifibroadcast and co. Oh and all the configurations like network card settings, enabling of the camera and HDMI mode are also automatically set.

Future plans

Currently, the image only supports 2.4GHz operation. I would like to extend the images to also support 5GHz Wifi sticks and choose the frequency automatically, depending on which sticks are connected. Unfortunately, I do not have compatible 5GHz Wifi sticks available so it is still unclear if and when this will happen.