Student Project: FPVRT – Smartphone-based Racetime Tracking
Making Race Time Tracking easily achivable for anyone
Student project in the Advanced FPV Quadcopter Course WiSe 23/24 by Alexander Wegner
Intro
With FPV Quadcopter, pilots tend to challenge each other to go faster and faster. To make this happen, race tracks with gates provide a well set environment to compare each other.
However, professional grade tracking devices are expensive and not easy to setup. With FPVRT, an everyday tool each of us carries with us used to replace the complexity of special hardware ground setup with a simple smartphone.
This project was developed during the winter semester of 2023/24 as part of the FPV Advanced Course (6 C).
About
When flying on the outside with friends, tracking the speeds and lap times of the amazing race track your squad has build can be a hassle.
Luckily, basically everyone has a smartphone with them. With a bit of fine-tuning on the screen and adjusting the camera on the finish line, the setup is easily done. For higher accuracy and convenience, the open source hardware companion (also developed in this project) can be attached to basically everything that flies.
With the help of the smartphone camera and a bit of simple image processing using the common OpenCV library, the known drones flying through the gates get easily tracked.
Show your friend who is the faster one now!
Features
- Use the smartphone camera to detect color-coded drones
- Use the FPVRT-companion to make everything flyable detectable
- Easy configuration via BLE and Android-App
- Coming soon: Increase accuracy with BLE beacons
- Store multiple races in the app
Requirements
- Android Smartphone with
- Android 14
- Decent Camera
