Station mode and sockets

clydemcqueen · Dec 11, 2018

Has anybody worked with 2+ Tello EDU (SDK 2.0) drones in "station mode" (sharing a single access point)?

A few questions:

1. Presumably the drones use DHCP to get new IP addresses. How does the controller discover the assigned IP addresses?

2. Do all of the drones send video packets to controller:11111 and state packets to controller:8890? I suppose these can be distinguished by the drone IP.

Thanks.

clydemcqueen · Jan 3, 2019

Update: I got the "ap" command to work on a single EDU drone, and I'm able to put the drone into SDK mode and get telemetry data on port 8890. However, I'm not receiving video packets on port 11111.

Using wireshark, I do see occasional UDP packets arriving on port 8899. The payload is 12 bytes, but I'm not sure how to interpret them.

Anybody get video to work in this mode?

Thanks.

clydemcqueen · Jan 16, 2019

Update: I got an email response from Ryze: "... at present, when the tello enters the station mode, the streamon instruction is not supported."

twissmueller · Jan 18, 2019

@clydemcqueen Did Ryze say anything if / when this will be available, if at all?

clydemcqueen · Jan 18, 2019

@twissmueller No. That was pretty much the entire response.

Paulie · Feb 5, 2019

clydemcqueen said:
Update: I got an email response from Ryze: "... at present, when the tello enters the station mode, the streamon instruction is not supported."

Any updates on this situation?

Mike Shock · Mar 18, 2019

I think station mode is for swarm programming. Am I right? Then there should be a way to send broadcast commands to all the drones that are connected to the same AP...

clydemcqueen · Mar 18, 2019

Mike Shock said:
I think station mode is for swarm programming. Am I right? Then there should be a way to send broadcast commands to all the drones that are connected to the same AP...

There's no broadcast capability that I know of. For most swarm use cases each drone needs unique instructions, so this isn't a big limitation.

In my case, I'm using the video stream from each drone to do precise localization using fiducial markers. Video streaming isn't supported in station mode, so I've been getting around this by using multiple Raspberry Pi computers and UDP packet forwarding. UDP forwarding code here: clydemcqueen/udp_forward

Mike Shock · Mar 19, 2019

clydemcqueen said:
There's no broadcast capability that I know of. For most swarm use cases each drone needs unique instructions, so this isn't a big limitation.

In my case, I'm using the video stream from each drone to do precise localization using fiducial markers. Video streaming isn't supported in station mode, so I've been getting around this by using multiple Raspberry Pi computers and UDP packet forwarding. UDP forwarding code here: clydemcqueen/udp_forward

Thanks for a useful hint!

frequency · May 15, 2019

Dear clydemcqueen,

With this you can't control the Tello right? it only for video stream?

Please advice and Thanks

Best Regards,
frequency

clydemcqueen · May 15, 2019

The UDP forwarder will only forward UDP streams, like the Tello video stream. There are several other packages to control the tello, such as hanyazou/TelloPy or clydemcqueen/tello_ros

gavinxiaozu · Jan 30, 2020

I am looking for the reason why I am not able to reveice video stream from port 11111 when drone is down statation mode until I see your reply by Ryze……

pianoman789 · Feb 25, 2020

Paulie said:
Any updates on this situation?

For current and future readers of this thread, I emailed Ryze directly around July last year asking them what their current plans were and this was the response:

Thanks for reaching Ryze!
Please kindly note that the camera stream can be received in the AP mode only but not the station mode.
dji-sdk/Tello-Python

Also, there is no plan about the supported in station mode for the being time.

Thanks and have a nice day!

Regards,

So yeah, in Swarm mode/ station mode, you cannot receive images annoyingly and they're not going to do anything about it! I expect this may be a business decision

and they decided to software lock it

Im unfortunately going to have to say that using multiple raspi pi's may be your best bet! You may be able to get away with just using DJI Tellos instead of /with the Edu's in that case as well!

T.M · Oct 15, 2020

clydemcqueen said:
There's no broadcast capability that I know of. For most swarm use cases each drone needs unique instructions, so this isn't a big limitation.

In my case, I'm using the video stream from each drone to do precise localization using fiducial markers. Video streaming isn't supported in station mode, so I've been getting around this by using multiple Raspberry Pi computers and UDP packet forwarding. UDP forwarding code here: clydemcqueen/udp_forward

I succeeded in obtaining the video while flying in formation this way.
I've been looking for a way to do it, so it's helpful.
Thank you very much.