Airboss

Airboss lets you use your phone as an alternative to a GoPro for R/C aerial photography and FPV. It works over either a cellular network or Wi-Fi and provides a real-time video stream to a ground station where you can command it to record video and take still photos (photos and videos are stored in the Airboss album on the phone). The ground station can be another Android device running Airboss or a laptop running Google Chrome.

You can keep up to date on progress and give feedback at http://airboss.io.

*** YOU PROBABLY DON'T WANT THIS YET! ***

IF YOU DECIDE TO TRY AIRBOSS, PLEASE DO NOT USE IT FOR ANYTHING IMPORTANT. YOU ARE USING AIRBOSS AT YOUR OWN RISK AND ASSUME ALL LIABILITY FOR ANY DAMAGES.

OK, with that out of the way...

This is an alpha release so you will likely experience all kinds of issues if you decide to try it out, including app crashes and various other bugs and poor user experiences. Sorry about that -- I'm working to eventually get these issues ironed out.

Latency for FPV is pretty good most of the time, though things can get choppy and laggy when there is network congestion or the phone has lots of background tasks. It's not as good as more traditional analog FPV solutions but it may be good enough depending on your needs.

So far tested it's been tested with a Galaxy S4, Galaxy S3, Nexus 4, Moto G, HTC One, Kyocera Hydro, and plenty of others. Unsurprisingly, the more expensive phones works better generally though the Moto G performs really quite well for its price. Also, some phones will take video and the highest possible quality (Nexus 4, Moto G) while others will only record video at the same resolution as the real time stream which is not very good (HTC One).

This is very much a work in progress so unless you're a glutton for punishment I recommend you pass on it for now. If you decide to give it a try anyway please email me at [email protected] and let me know how (or if) it worked for you. If you do end up using Airboss regularly I'd love to see pictures of it in action and will try to get them up on the website for others to check out.