PixelPilot_rk

Important

Warning, this is an experimental project.

Use this software at your own risk.

Introduction

WFB-ng client (Video Decoder) for Rockchip platform powered by the Rockchip MPP library. It also displays a simple cairo based OSD that shows the bandwidth, decoding latency, and framerate of the decoded video, and wfb-ng link statistics.

This project is based on a unique frozen development FPVue_rk by Gee He.

Tested on RK3566 (Radxa Zero 3W) and RK3588s (Orange Pi 5).

Compilation

Build on the Rockchip linux system directly.

Install dependencies

• drm, cairo, mpp, logging

sudo apt install libdrm-dev libcairo-dev librockchip-mpp-dev libspdlog-dev

• gstreamer

sudo apt install libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-bad1.0-dev

Build Instructions

Build and run application in production environment:

cmake -B build
sudo cmake --build build --target install
build/pixelpilot

Build and run application for debugging purposes:

cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug
cmake --build build
build/pixelpilot --osd

Usage

Show command line options:

pixelpilot --help

Known issues

1. Video is cropped when the fpv feed resolution is bigger than the screen mode.
2. Crashes when video feed resolution is higher than the screen resolution.

The way it works

It uses mpp library to decode MPEG frames using Rockchip hardware decoder. It uses gstreamer to read the RTP media stream from video UDP. It uses mavlink decoder to read Mavlink telemetry from telemetry UDP (if enabled), see mavlink.c It uses cairo library to draw OSD elements (if enabled), see osd.c. It uses Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) to display video on the screen, see drm.c. It writes raw MPEG stream to file as DVR (if enabled) using minimp4.h library.

Pixelpilot starts several threads:

• main thread controls gstreamer which reads RTP, extracts MPEG frames and
  • feeds them to MPP hardware decoder
  • sends them to DVR thread via mutex-protected std::queue (if enabled)
• DVR_THREAD (if enabled) reads frames from main thread via std::queue and writes them to disk using minimp4 library it yields on a condition variable for DVR queue or kill signal variable
• FRAME_THREAD reads decoded video frames from MPP hardware decoder and forwards them to DISPLAY_THREAD through DRM output_list protected by video_mutex Seems that thread vields on mpi->decode_get_frame() call waiting for HW decoder to return a new frame
• DISPLAY_THREAD reads frames and OSD from video_mutex-protected output_list and calls drm* functions to render them on the screen The loop yields on video_mutex and video_cond waiting for a new frame to display from FRAME_THREAD
• MAVLINK_THREAD (if OSD and mavlink configured) reads mavlink packets from UDP, decodes and updates osd_vars (without any mutex) The loop yields on UDP read
• OSD_THREAD (if OSD is enabled) takes drm_fd and output_list as thread parameters draws telemetry on a buffer inside output_list based on osd_vars using Cairo library The loop yelds on explicit sleep to control refresh rate

Release

• update project version in CMakeList.txt, project(pixelpilot, VERSION <X.Y.Z>), commit
• push that commit to master (either directly or with PR)
• tag the tip of the master branch with the same <X.Y.Z> version
• run git push --tags; it will publish a new GitHub release