Ruby Digital System

Ruby - Digital radio link (video, data, control) for airplanes, drones and UAVs

Welcome to Ruby

Ruby is a complete solution (hardware and software) for robust end to end digital radio links, designed specifically for controlling and managing UAVs/drones/planes/cars and other remote vehicles. Highlights:

Encryption: The radio links can be encrypted end to end;
Rendundant radio links: Multiple renduntant radio links in different bands (433Mhz, 868/915Mhz, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5 and 5.8Ghz) can be used simultaneously between vehicles, ground control stations and relays for better resilience, link quality and range;
Relaying: Mobile (vehicles) and/or fixed relay nodes can be inserted in the system for longer range and penetration beyond line of sight;
Live video, telemetry, remote control, auxiliary & custom data transport;
Rich user interface;

Flying over mountains, 20km away:

Here you will find all the info you need and step by step guides on how to build a complete digital radio link to be used for remote controlling vehicles (planes, drones, cars, UAVs), for sending/receiving data, telemetry and for live HD video. The system is built using hardware components available on the market. All you need is the software from the downloads section and the minimal set of components listed in the hardware section.

Basic system overview:
The system has two main components:

The controller itself, who handles the communication with the vehicles, the settings, the video feed display and the vehicle control;

The vehicle, which is responsible with communicating with the controller, getting the video stream from the camera and sending commands to the flight controller and getting the telemetry from it.

Features highlights:

Being a digital link, end to end, gives you advantages over regular analog RF links, like: noise free video feed, ability to send data too (like telemetry and other custom data), error correction, data reliability, have more configurable parameters as it relates to the end to end video link, not just frequency and band; but also parameters like resolution, framerate, resilience and so on; and also enables some exotic scenarios like 3D video, camera switching and so on pretty much out of the box.

Ruby supports right out of the box:

Multiple radio links, redundant radio links, diversity radio tx/rx for better link quality;
Radio link encryption;
Live view of the video and audio feed; Supported resolutions: SD, 480p, 720p, 920p 1080p; 4:3, 16:9 or 21:9 aspect ratio; framerates: custom, 24,30,60 fps;
Bidirectional radio link for better video streaming quality;
Video Recording;
Long range radio link: the range of the radio link is (based on setup) between 2 km to 40km (maximum tested so far);
Supports multiple RF bands: 2.4Ghz and 5.8Ghz (433Mhz, 868Mhz, 915Mhz coming soon);
Low end to end latency of the video feed (as low as 80ms); Latency of telemetry and remote control is even lower, less than 10ms
Bind multiple models (just like a regular remote control) and switch between them, live;
Real time control of the vehicle and telemetry data;
Spectator mode: allows others to be just spectators, watching the live video feed.
Software update of the vehicles over the radio link;
Multiple OSD layouts;
Detailed info on link quality and video decoding stats;
Multiple camera profiles, live switching between them for different flight conditions;
Bidirectional telemetry and custom data feeds. For telemetry, MAVLink and LTM are supported, other protocols are still in progress;
A comprehensive list of settings and parameters, all can be changed on the fly using the OSD and menu;

Here is how the user interface and video display looks like on the controller:

What range to expect:

On 2.4Ghz, using 200mW of power: about 2-3 km range (solid full HD video); Range is shorter if you are in a city area with a lot of WiFi traffic;
On 5.8Ghz, using 400mw of power: about 3.5-4 km range (solid full HD video); People regularly fly to 7-8 Km out on omnidirectional antennas only with solid link (see resources section for examples);
People have done tens of kilometers distance flights using Ruby, maximum reported range so far is 40 km;

* This is on 720p, using circular polarised antennas, 2-3db of gain; with high gain directional antennas range can be increased by an order of magnitude;