1. Introduction

First Person View has become popular among RC enthusiasts. FPV is typically implemented with dedicated equipment such as PAL/NTSC analog video cameras, 2.4/5.8 GHz transmitters, and analog video goggles with built-in receivers. Such equipment can of course be mounted on a LEGO model. In this project, instead, we merge radio control and FPV functionality into the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 platform, leveraging its relatively powerful ARM9 system-on-chip, embedded Linux OS, USB capabilities and wireless connectivity. Digital video is received and displayed by a generic smartphone in a Google Cardboard-style headset.

As an illustration of the benefits of a fully digital and integrated system, we overlay telemetry data with just a few lines of Javascript code. In a legacy analog system this would typically require dedicated on-board hardware.

In the current implementation a Bluetooth gamepad connects directly to the EV3 brick, and MJPEG video from USB webcams is also transmitted over Bluetooth (HTTP/TCP/IP/BNEP) with adjustable trade-offs between image quality and frame rate. We discuss ways to improve range, latency and video quality.