Artur Pękosz's Palm-Sized Quadcopter Drone Uses a Single-Camera Raspberry Pi for FPV and Recording

Drone maker Artur Pękosz has created a compact quadcopter, the Lahn Cinewhoop, which is designed for single-camera first-person view (FPV) flight and high-definition recording — and that is powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W single-board computer.

"[The Lahn Cinewhoop] is built around a Pavo 20 frame, with motors and flight controller from BetaFPV,"Pękosz writes of his compact creation, which uses two-inch propellers. "It uses a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and a Camera Module V3 for both recording and transmitting the video with an analog FPV transmitter."

"I was originally inspired by [a] post about a Raspberry Pi Zero FPV drone, which I found quite neat as the same camera is used for both the transmitted and the recorded video," Pękosz continues. "The composite video output of the Raspberry Pi is connected to an analog FPV transmitter."

While the frame of the compact quadcopter is off-the-shelf, it required some modification for Pękosz' project — including 3D-printed fixing to mount the camera and a framework to protect the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W during flight. "The initial design [had] the the camera holder hot-glued to the Raspberry Pi protector," Pękosz explains, "but I realized the camera footage was blurry, so I added some sponge and used rubber-bands instead of screws to reduce the amount of vibrations transferred from the frame to the camera."

The single-camera transmission system makes use of the Raspberry Pi's ability to output composite analog video — using the 3.5mm A/V jack on Raspberry Pi 4 boards and older or an unpopulated pin header on the Raspberry Pi Zero family and the new Raspberry Pi 5 — to connect a live view to an off-the-shelf analog wireless video transmitter while simultaneously recording digital footage to an on-board microSD card.

"I use a switch on my RC transmitter to cleanly shut down Linux on the Raspberry Pi before I disconnect the battery," Pękosz notes. "The 'Lahn_4' program can record video at 1080p 30 FPS, but needs a significant GPU overclock to record reliably — [and] short stutters still happen. The 'Lahn_3' program works without overclock, but the best it can do is 720p at 50 FPS."

More information on the project is available in Pękosz' video embedded above and on his YouTube channel, while STL files for 3D printing and a full parts list have been published to Hackaday.io.