OpenHD 2.2 Evo

Dear community,

A year has passed, after the last release with little to no information about how development is going on.

First, we want to thank you for your patience. We know that we have been quite silent about what’s happening. In the future we want to change this and post community updates in regular intervals.

A little background:

More than a year ago, Stephen (who was the most active developer behind OpenHD at that time) decided to leave OpenHD. He left at an unfortunate timing – after teasing a new 3.0 version with many new features and multi-platform compatibility. Back then, it was already clear that OpenHD needed more consistent and standardized approaches in its core to provide a solid foundation for new and existing features – basically a re-write.

However, since Stephen left in the midst of doing so, we were left with an incomplete version of OpenHD that lacked documentation. And while some of us successfully managed to glue old scripts and new code together (2.0.12B Release Candidate, 2.1) it became clear that this solution is neither efficient nor maintainable.

All those things combined meant that we had no other choice than basically starting from scratch and re-writing OpenHD and QOpenHD. This was an immense effort, and it took more than 6months to re-implement the most basic functionalities in a consistent way. 

We’re still working on that version, but are making steady progress, also we can tell that the first release is in view. We can’t tell you when, since the road is full of obstacles, but we can tell so much that some releases did get to a small group of testers a few weeks ago.

So how is progress going ? 

Currently we have a foundation which is working, we get video and telemetry on ground and air. H265 is implemented, but the low-latency mode is not finished/enabled yet. Also some features needed to be temporarily cut (for now [e.g. VR]).

We’re currently working on reducing latency step by step, because we’re trying to shave every ms we can. Also we’re reintegrating Plugins, expanding camera support and much more.

Also in Version 2.2-evo we’ll introduce the Nvidia Jetson, and X86 support (linux only).