Lowkey Spycam

Inspiration

Seemed like a really cool thing to make

How it works

Drone built with vex parts. Uses logitech tessar camera to capture video. Plugs into raspberry pi, which is connected to iphone hotspot. Raspberry pi GPIO pins go into Arduino input analog pins, and the arduino powers the drone (Raspberry pi 3.3V wasn't enough to power vex motors, but a servo shield on arduino allowed an override of the 5v regulator and allowed the use of a 9v battery). Website runs on node.js server, uses rpi-gpio to control gpio pins with node. Used socket.io to communicate between website javascript and node. The camera is livestreamed to youtube via wireshark with mjpg streamer link, and the website embeds the youtube livestream. The drone can be controlled from anywhere in the world by setting the iphone hotspot as a static ip and giving that a forwarding address to stream on a specific port on it's ip address.

Challenges I ran into

Getting socket.io to work, minimizing lag time with livestream (accomplished by lowering camera fps), and getting the forwarding address and static ip configurations to work on iphone hotspot

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Actually getting it to work!!!!

What I learned

node is fantastic, raspberry pi is really cool, and socket.io

What's next for Lowkey Spycam

Making it bigger and better: Better camera, higher fps, hopefully lower lag.

Built With

• arduino
• express.js
• gpio
• jquery
• node.js
• raspberry-pi
• rpi-gpio
• socket.io