How the link works
TX — the air side
An OpenIPC camera runs the Waybeam encoder, turning the sensor into a stream and handing it straight to the radio. The frame rate set here decides most of your latency budget.
The radio link
devourer carries video, telemetry, and control over commodity Realtek adapters, straight from userspace — no association, no retransmit stalls, and rate, power and channel set per frame.
RX — your side
PixelPilot turns a Rockchip board into a dedicated ground station — the fastest way to receive. Aviateur runs on the Windows, Linux, or macOS machine you already own.
TX → devourer → RX
FPV: from lens to goggles
A fully open digital FPV system: no locked ecosystem, no paired hardware, no firmware ceiling. Build the air unit from a supported camera, pick your ground station, and tune every stage of the pipeline.
Beyond drones: robots and teleoperation
The same link carries video for industrial robots, AGVs, inspection rigs, and remote operation — anywhere a closed video system would lock you in or a cloud hop would add seconds.
On supported SoCs, frames carry wall-clock timestamps tied to the sensor frame start — millisecond-class synchronization for multi-camera rigs without extra hardware.
Building a product on this link? Talk to us — we do custom development and OEM work.
Pick the build, and install it
Four builds of the air unit. wfb-ng, RubyFPV and apfpv differ in the radio link; Waybeam keeps wfb-ng and changes the encoder. Which one you want is decided by what is at the other end. Each installs from the same instructions as any other OpenIPC firmware.
wfb-ng
The OpenIPC link, and what the build guide sets up. wfb-ng broadcasts the video with no pairing and no association, and adaptive-link moves the bitrate as the signal changes.
Install on
SSC338QSSC30KQSSC378QEGK7205V200GK7205V210GK7205V300HI3516EV200HI3516EV300
Waybeam
wfb-ng's link with Waybeam in place of Majestic: an open-source encoder for SigmaStar SSC338Q/SSC30KQ with sensor modes unlocked up to 144 fps, its own web page and HTTP API. Experimental.
Install on
Not built for any SoC yet.
RubyFPV
For a RubyFPV ground station. RubyFPV's own link and telemetry take the place of wfb-ng; the camera side is otherwise the same.
Install on
apfpv
Plain WiFi instead of broadcast. The air unit runs an access point and the ground station joins it, so anything with a WiFi adapter can receive the stream.
Install on
Stuck on a build? Book an hour with a core developer
OpenIPC's core developers take paid support sessions through the project's Open Collective: an hour on your air unit, your link or your integration.
$55 an hour suggested · $50 minimum · paid through Open Collective
How fast, really
What decides your number is the ground station, far more than the resolution you pick. These are figures people report from flying this stack on their own hardware.
Reported in the OpenIPC and wfb-ng chats, not measured by us. Resolution barely moves the number; frame rate and screen refresh decide it — change nothing but the monitor and the same camera shifts by 120 ms.
Hardware
Air units are built from supported cameras and AIO boards — start from the supported hardware list. RunCam and other vendors ship OpenIPC-based FPV hardware out of the box.