Here’s my FPV Rover project. The hope is to remotely operate the vehicle and control from my racing simulator. I started the design around a Traxxas TRX-4, Cube Black autopilot with Here GPS and built a video and telemetry transceiver based on the OpenHD project.

I wanted something more stable and a little larger, so I picked up a 1/5th scale Losi DBXLE.

I also decided to move to the Siyi MK32 system with an A8 Mini camera. This unit transmits both telemetry and video from the vehicle to the ground station. It also allows me to connect to a computer for video and telemetry. I’m using a HolyBro PM08-CAN Power module to convert the 8S battery voltage down to the Cube Black. It will also report the voltage and current and SOC of the batteries to the Ground unit. I’ve got a RadioMaster MT12 and ER6 receiver for backup controls.

Then I found some STL files for the DBXLE that another hobbyist made, which includes an upper and a lower platform for mounting electronics. My friend and I printed these and they were installed on the vehicle.

A friend, whom I met through the online drone community heard about my project and offered to help write some software that would take in the Mavlink Telemetry data from the Cube Black connection to the Siyi MK32 over UDP, and push that to my Racing Sim running SRS. We did some initial testing on the original TRX-4 concept, but some home projects put that on hold. We were able to move the vehicle and have the Racing sim react to roll and pitch as well as heave. Below are some pictures of the Racing simulator that I built.

Here’s a video showing the initial bench testing we did with the Cube Black sending Mavlink data to his software, then to my actuators. We slowed it down a bit for testing.

I’ve got to mount the electronics and do some initial testing, and move the Racing Sim back from being put away during home projects. More to come as the project progresses.