Hexacopter Drone Build Project – Part 10 Onboard Computer and Ethernet - Ethernet on a

Ethernet on a Drone? Yes, it can be done!

Welcome to the next installment of my Drone Electronics Prototyping series! In this video, I'll be continuing with the bench prototyping for the drone by installing a Raspberry Pi companion computer and setting up an Ethernet network onboard using a BotBlox SwitchBlox Ethernet switch.

I'll connect the Herelink Air Unit to the network and demonstrate various ways to communicate with the devices over TCP/IP. I’ll assign a static IP address to a Raspberry Pi, setup routing rules, show how the Ground Control Station (GCS) can communicate with the Raspberry Pi through the HereLink connection, and pull up an RTSP video feed on the Ground Control Station using both VLC Media Player and Mission Planner.

This video may have some slow parts as I work through the setup process, so feel free to fast forward as needed.

For detailed documentation and materials list, visit my GitHub repository: https://github.com/timarcher/Drone

The page dedicated to this video with command examples is here:
https://github.com/timarcher/Drone/bl...

Timestamps
0:00 Intro
1:32 SwitchBlox Power Wiring
4:03 Raspberry Pi Power Wiring
5:26 HereLink Air Unit Ethernet Cable
6:07 BotBlox SwitchBlox Cables and Adapters
7:44 Micro HDMI Cable for Air Unit
8:35 Raspberry Pi 5 Active Cooler Fan Installation
11:07 Smoke Test
12:36 MicroSD Card Preparation
15:28 Installing OS on MicroSD Card
22:58 Install MicroSD Card into the Raspberry Pi
28:34 SSH to the Raspberry Pi and Apply Updates
37:12 Ethernet Physical Connections
40:45 Outlining the steps for the rest of this video
50:02 Raspberry Pi Static IP Address Assignment
55:30 Routing and Pinging
57:53 Ground Control Station Routing to HereLink
1:02:49 Show SSH to Pi over the HereLink Connection
1:05:57 Show video feed in VLC media player
1:09:13 Show video feed in mission planner
1:12:30 Python and pymavlink