Savage_Smithy Posted January 31, 2015 Share Posted January 31, 2015 hey all, Just bought myself a gopro hero 4 black edition and want to use it for fpv, i know you can make up or buy premade video out/power in usb cables for them but i'm just wondering if the 5v output on the fatshark transmitter will power it or do i need an external BEC or even a charging circuit to prevent damage? It wasn't cheap so I just want to be reasonably sure before i just start putting wires in it. Thanks, Smithy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
smeghead28 Posted January 31, 2015 Share Posted January 31, 2015 (edited) Mixing video output and charging at the same time will result in interference on the FPV screen. The interference is bearble,see here at about 1min onwards I know that is with the gimble but the principle remains the same regardless of how you do it. It seems you cant charge the Gopro and output video at the same time without the video suffering this interference. This happened to me with both the Gopro 3 & 4 Edited January 31, 2015 by smeghead28 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tamiyacowboy Posted January 31, 2015 Share Posted January 31, 2015 stick the camera into VGA mode ie lowest video size possible. less work the onboard chip does means less power consumed. some sort of filtering could be implimented but nodoubt means shielding foil and not a good idea in a small space. theres a pont where you have to choose, lovely eyecandy video with like 30m to an hour record time, or cut down the quality and gain huge record times. aerial photography and video, yeah push out the boat grab some spare batterys and do a timed run on the camera. knowing how long the camera runs for is nice to know. FPV ( first person view ) this anology in rc is incorrect, people think adding a camera is FPV, its not but its aerial imaging. FPV is where you combine a low to mid quality camera and use this feed ONLY to fly. its overlayed with all current craft status and signal strngths, battery amps and voltages, airspeed , direction , altitude , pitch and yaw, with a horizon marker. Here your aim is squeezing some quality but more so run time length, so the system is geared to live feed only and no recording. a second camera with high quality feed would then be used to beam the fancy eyecandy view and you would record this at the ground base via a capture dongle and laptop ( huge hard drive means your able to capture a long sequence video.) so fancy eyecandy things you go full quality but you loose out on runtime hence the need to spare battery up and a few spare memory cards. for the FPV aspect you will want to gear towards just live feed in low or medium quality , and a secondary camera to beam the live feed eyecandy Do you leach power from the main battery thus depleting the quads powersource ? or do you run the camera with its own powersource and free up the quads power source abiet having a shorter video recording time. This is the choice you as a pilot has to make, you cannot have the best of both worlds, so you have to make a choice. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
smeghead28 Posted January 31, 2015 Share Posted January 31, 2015 Easier to just run with the Gopro's own power. Whilst it doesn't run the main quad battery down by much the charge in the Gopros battery will last a couple of hours at least so there is little to gain by keeping it topped up with the quads battery. If you want longer run times buy another Gopro battery. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Savage_Smithy Posted January 31, 2015 Author Share Posted January 31, 2015 Alright then cheers for the info guys, Probably going to use its own battery power and will try fpv through the gopro for now and if the lag is too bad when flying i'll get a little 600tvl camera for flying and maybe a video switcher. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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