Build Your Own Channel Bonding Wireless Twitch Streaming Backpack with a Raspberry Pi

Twitch streaming is incredibly popular, and not just for gaming. Many people stream all kinds of activities, but those are usually limited to their home because of the limitations of wireless data connections. While you might have a speedy 4G connection are your smartphone in some areas, the upload speed is probably still limited and you’re likely to go through an area where your connection becomes poor. The solution is channel bonding, and you can take advantage of it to create your own backpack for wireless Twitch streaming using a Raspberry Pi.

Channel bonding is a technique for combining multiple network connections in order to improve the overall throughput and reliability of the connection. In this case, it’s being used for Twitch streaming to keep a stable live stream at 720p 24FPS. That would normally be difficult to achieve without the occasional loss of frames or quality, but channel bonding can dramatically improve the situation. This entire setup fits inside of a backpack for portability, allowing you to run a Twitch live stream when you’re out and about.

In this build log, they use a Sony AS-300 camera, but you should be able to use almost any camera capable of providing an HD video feed to a computer. That computer is a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, which is compact and requires little power, but can still handle HD video easily. The channel bonding is provided by Speedify software, and works with multiples connection types. An Elgato Cam Link is used to connect the Sony AS-300 to the Raspberry Pi, and a custom remote control was made with an Adafruit Circuit Playground Express. The total budget for this project is $600, and that even includes the camera. That makes it far more affordable than comparable products on the market today. If you’re interested in Twitch streaming on the go, this is definitely something to consider.