Using the XRD2 with a FLiR Camera

With the upgrade of the XRD to the XRD2 the largest improvement is the ability to stream HD quality video from the device to any other device with an internet connection. The XRD2 is currently designed to only accept video over the onboard micro-USB, so connecting cameras may require finding the correct adapter. One of those sensors/cameras are FLiR cameras which only has a mini HDMI connection for video. This blog post will go over how we were able to get a FLiR camera to work with one of our XRD2’s and stream video on the Relay 2 desktop app.

The first thing we’ll need to do is find out what kind of port you’re using to feed video to your current setup. Ours just has a micro HDMI port for outputting video. With some searching we were able to find a micro HDMI to standard HDMI cable, then an HDMI to USB converter to then use a simple USB to micro USB in order to connect to the XRD2. Below you can see the cable chain that we used in order to connect the camera to our XRD2.

For this setup, we used an HDMI to USB capture card. Here’s a link to a similiar one - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B091NWB4RJ?

Once you have all that hooked up to your current set up with a FLiR camera then simply power the whole system up. Pictured above is our complete system, it is a bit wonky due to other projects utilizing drones so its not clean, but its the barebones needed to get this system to work. After being powered you can go into Relay2 on a PC or laptop and connect to your XRD2. Scroll to the bottom of Relay2 and select the quality of video that you would want to stream and click “start” and give it a bit to start up video and display to your screen. Below shows our video on Botlink’s Relay2 app with us using a wifi link as we were indoors at the time.

Not shown is that our FLiR camera is connected to a gimbal that then connects to a drone that can control it via Mavlink commands. So, if wanted one can control the camera position and settings just through the XRD2 over a cellular connection! Using the cables shown can be cumbersome but in order to use a valuable asset such as a FLiR camera in BVLOS operations allows for more it to be useful in these operations.