Camera to App Project Help

Projects General Guidance
1

Hi, I'm a noob in this stuff and I would like to make a drone with a camera that is controlled on a smartphone with an app i can create (i'm good in programming). The camera feed should be shown on the app.
The problem comes here where I cannot figure out how to send a real-time video stream from the camera to the smartphone. I read on the Internet that since the arduino hasn't much computing power it would be nice to use a raspberry pi along the arduino to manage the camera feed.

Any suggestions?

2

And ESP32CAM will stream video over WiFi;

3

I agree that the esp32cam is probably what you are looking for. You can buy them along with a "motherboard" on eBay which has usb which makes programming them easier (search for "esp32cam-mb") or I have recently seen slightly larger esp32cam modules with the usb included.

BTW - I have a sketch here which may also be of interest as it shows some of the things you can easily do with these boards: GitHub - alanesq/esp32cam-demo: esp32cam module demo / shows how you can easily use the esp32cam including reading raw rgb data, streaming, displaying the image etc.(ArduinoIDE or PlatformIO)

4

Do tha camera and the smartphone need to be on the same wi-fi? or the smartphone connects to the camera wi-fi?
Because I would like to use the drone wherever I want even if there's not wi-fi

5

Then you could use a mobile phone connected WiFi hot spot, but I am not sure if the ESP32CAM could be connected to via the Internet through one of the Hot spot thingies.

Remember, In a lot of places in the World you cannot fly the drone out of sight .......

6

Is there a way to use Bluetooth? The hc-12 has a range of 1km and it would be awesome

7

Bluetooth is short range and the HC-12 is UHF device without the bandwidth for streaming video.

Some tests using a nRF24L01 here;

8

The esp32cam can connect to an existing wifi or create it's own
see: ESP32 Access Point (AP) for Web Server | Random Nerd Tutorials

BTW - I don't find the onboard antenna on the esp32cam to be as good as other esp32 development boards so it may be worth getting one which is supplied with an external antenna.