control of RC car via FPV camera & remote user

[lancsDavid]

i'm trying to build a RC car that has a First Person View (FPV) camera on it, which can be controlled by a user remotely who is looking at the camera feed rather than the car. a very common thing to do. but one that involves minimizing the latency in the video signal cos you can't drive fast if you've too much lag.

in a moment-to-moment sense, images presumably need capturing, encoding quickly, streaming wirelessly & then decoding before at the user before the user can see them (i'm presuming this is how its done). but whilst researching this problem i've heard it said that boards like the raspberry pi are simply too slow at encoding video. so i'm wondering if...

a) the parallela is an option worth pursuing for this kind of problem
b) whether its better to just go for a raspberry-pi-like board but one with a hardware video-encoding chip on it (i think i've seen one that has)

i mean, a) is not a wholly unattractive option as i've worked my way through 1/2 of the mighty SICP & wouldn't be averse to learning a bit of parallel programming in order to get the job done. however, if it's possible but there are no resources or anything around to help me its probably never gonna happen, cos i'm far from an expert programmer.

any advice appreciated

david

[sebraa]

Just breaking it down:

- capture video: You need a camera for that. There is a project going on here, which allows to connect a RPi camera, but this is not ready for "just use", as far as I see it. So you'd need to use a USB webcam.
- encode video: The Epiphany chip has 16 cores with 32 KB of (fast) memory each, or 512 KB total. This rules out modern codecs, but if you implement a simple system yourself, it might work. The ARM cores might be fast enough, but that defies the purpose, I think.
- transmit wireless: Parallella does not contain wireless communication, so you'd need to connect a USB WiFi device or something.
- decode video: Does not need to be done on the Parallella (but if you encode on the Epiphany, you can decode on the Epiphany as well).

USB on the Parallella is somewhat flaky, and connecting two high-speed, low-latency devices to the same bus might not be the best idea.

[tnt]

The RPi cam works fine ... it doesn't have a V4L2 driver so you have to use a custom userspace software to read out the data, but other than that it's ready to go.

There is still a 1k$ bounty on doing the kernel driver if anyone is interested.