Streaming video over LTE

[Aldo Castro Freire]

Is there any tutorial on how to do that? Or is there any recommendation on how to get started. Wifi is not good enough for long distances.
Is there a way to modify voxl-rtsp or do I have to forward the stream somewhere?

[Chad Sweet]

If the VOXL is connected to a VPN via LTE, then you should use the VOXL's endpoint IP as the RTSP video server for a video client (QGC, VLC, etc) connected to the same VPN. voxl-rtsp would be one way to stream the video

[Aldo Castro Freire]

Hi Chad, how do I change the endpoint for the voxl-rtsp I think right now is only sending to the local area network 192.168.8.1. I am not sure of where to change that ?

[Aldo Castro Freire]

Nevermind As long as the setup is fine, the rtsp will send it using the LTE.
PS: you need to connect your local machine to the VPN also.

Now my question is: is this the order I must follow To allow streaming over LTE I have to connect to the VPN and then start streaming ? is there a way to set up a script to activate like a minute after LTE connection is established to connect to the VPN and then start streaming. Otherwise, if I start streaming before I connect to the VPN it won't work. ? if so is there documentation on how to write a service?

[Chad Sweet]

It's a standard Linux service, take a look at the voxl-modem service for an example

[tom]

@Aldo-Castro-Freire The services that we use to start LTE and VPN on bootup are voxl-modem, as Chad mentioned, voxl-time-sync which is a simple script which loops until the date / time is correct, meaning a connection to the internet has been established, and voxl-vpn, which will then start the OpenVPN service after voxl-time-sync has finished.

[Aldo Castro Freire]

Does voxl-vpn works with the new version of openvpn because I update mine to the 2.4.6

Also is this a service? Or does voxl-vpn sets up the service as voxl-configure-modem does? I haven't seen anu documentation for voxl-vpn.

[tom]

voxl-vpn is just a wrapper for calling OpenVPN, it's not required, you can use OpenVPN on its own. We haven't tested with 2.4.6 but I don't see why it wouldn't work. All you should need to do is modify the key path in the service file.

[Aldo Castro Freire]

Okay. So basically use voxl-modem.service as a sample and exec voxl-vpn instead voxl-modem-start.sh .And start this service after voxl-modem.service

[tom]

All the voxl-modem.service does is call voxl-modem-start.sh.

So what I would recommend and what works for us is:

Start voxl-modem service -> Gets LTE connection up and running
Start voxl-time-sync sevice -> Verifies connection to internet
Start vpn-start service -> Connects to VPN

If you have all three of these enabled they should start at the correct times to get you going.

[tom]

@tom OpenVPN will fail if the date / time is not set correctly, that is why we use voxl-time-sync to have OpenVPN wait until the date / time is correct. This sometimes takes a couple seconds after the modem has connected to the network

[Aldo Castro Freire]

Is there a command called vpn-start? I cannot find it in my voxl. Or should I make a script that opens the vpn?

[tom]

vpn-start is a service file that you can find at /etc/systemd/system/vpn-start.service. You can modify the KEY_FILE parameter with the path to your OpenVPN key file and enable the service using systemctl enable vpn-start.

[Aldo Castro Freire]

Hi is there an easy way to open and read a file in Voxl such as nano and vim ?? it is a pain to have to transfer files between machines

[tom]

Yes you can use vi on VOXL