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YonderRC

Beyond-line-of-sight remote control over IP — video, control and configuration for cars, boats, planes and drones. Runs in the browser (incl. phone), as a desktop app (Windows/Linux), and on a Raspberry Pi as the vehicle computer. Built for LTE.

Everything runs in a simulator, with no hardware. For the real build see docs/HARDWARE.md.

FPV with the full OSD: GPS + home compass, distance, odometer and speed (top left), battery bar (top right), voltage/current/mAh (bottom right), link health as one score (top centre). Light or dark is set on the vehicle (Setup › Design).

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What YonderRC does

Control

• 16 channels over WebSocket or a WebRTC data channel; keyboard, on-screen buttons, gamepad or a full touch joystick (multitouch, deadzone, spring return).
• Models for car / boat / plane / drone with matching channel templates, selectable input method and per-axis detent (center/min/free).
• Per channel: trim, expo, reverse, endpoints (µs), failsafe value.
• Response curves per stick channel (3/5/7/9 points, live plot) for shapes expo cannot express. Off by default.
• Live trims under the sticks: 5 µs a press, up to ±150 µs, saved with the model.
• Speed limiter, three steps, switchable while driving. Scaled around the throttle's rest position, so a car is capped in both directions and a plane only upwards.

Touch control, hold-to-arm, speed limiter, the WebRTC toggle, and a status strip: link, state, session, round-trip, link gaps, input, vehicle, telemetry.

On a phone

• A normal web page — open it over the LAN, the Pi's own hotspot or a VPN address. No install; the vehicle can serve it itself.
• Responsive layout and a compact OSD that drops secondary readouts so it stops covering the picture (FPV › ⚙ › OSD size).

Mobile view — click to expand

The same app at 390 px: compact OSD, wrapped FPV tools, arm button and touch stick.

Safety

• Failsafe watchdog: no control frames → every channel goes to its failsafe value. Vehicle-type aware and separate from disarming — drone holds, car/boat stops, plane goes to motor off.
• Arming; every connection starts disarmed. Auto-disarm on reconnect follows the vehicle type (car/boat on, plane/drone off), overridable in Setup › Controls.
• Hold-to-arm (1 s default) for arm and disarm, on the button and on a bound key/controller button. Adjustable, switchable off. Panic-disarm stays instant and ships unbound, so you pick a key you cannot hit by accident.
• Pre-arm check: throttle must be at its rest position.
• Stick feedback (off by default): a click or rumble at centre and at the rim, since a thumb on glass has no edge to feel for. iPhones cannot vibrate from a web page, so the default is a click.
• Model switching and settings are locked while armed.
• Optional shared secret (off by default) for the control link and setup API.

The real vehicle output in µs, including failsafe and disarm.

Video (FPV)

• Low-latency video over go2rtc/WebRTC; H.264 encoder auto-detected (libx264, libopenh264, Pi hardware).
• Self-healing: detects a frozen picture and reconnects; the last frame stays up.
• Quality switchable live (high/medium/low) or Auto — starts low, climbs when the link is clearly good, steps down fast when it is not.
• CSI camera module picked in the browser. Only the four official Pi sensors are auto-detected; anything else needs a device-tree overlay, which Setup writes (one backup, reboot flagged). Rotation/mirroring and, where the module has an actuator, focus are per camera.
• No camera is a supported setup: remove every entry and the FPV area stays dark while OSD, telemetry and controls carry on.
• OSD with status, channels, bitrate/loss/FPS/video latency and telemetry. Every block and every single sensor value can be switched off.
• Recording & snapshots locally, bindable to a key or button.

Telemetry

• Voltage/current sensors (ADS1115/1015, MCP3008/3208, INA219/226/228/237/238/260/3221, ACS712/758 — or sim), coulomb counting and battery % from the capacity.
• Sim values are marked SIM; a missing real sensor shows NO SENSOR, never faked numbers. Telemetry can be turned off entirely.
• % source is selectable: coulomb, a full/empty voltage curve, or clamp (the lower of the two).
• Temperature, 1..n: Pi SoC, DS18B20, MCP9808 / TMP102 / TMP117 / BMP280 / BME280, MAX6675 / MAX31855 / MAX31856 / MAX31865, or an NTC/PT100 on an ADS1115 / MCP3008.
• Any number of channels, individually switchable in the OSD; labels appear once a kind has more than one channel.
• One channel is primary and drives the battery %, mAh/Wh, the low-battery warning and the blackbox — so a second sensor cannot quietly take over the battery maths.
• INA228 (recommended) counts charge in hardware, so the mAh no longer depend on the polling rate. 85 V bus, 20-bit. INA237/238 are the same family without the counter.
• Low-battery warning on percent / voltage / mAh, with a blinking OSD marker, rumble and a beep.
• Return-home energy budget (off by default): measures consumption per km and answers how much further you may go and still get home. A percentage cannot — 30 % is plenty at 50 m and not enough at 800 m. Needs capacity, a current sensor and a home point.
• Voice callouts (on by default, offline): link lost/restored, failsafe, arm state, low battery. A beep says that something happened, a voice says what.
• Link health as one number: round-trip, loss and signal as a 0–100 score with a trend arrow. It is the worst of the three, not an average. The individual numbers come back by themselves when the link goes bad.
• Blackbox logging (off by default): 2 Hz CSV of arm/failsafe, link, round-trip, bitrate, loss, FPS, video latency, mAh, percent, one column per telemetry channel, and the GPS track in the same row — so you can colour the route by pack voltage in QGIS. A second button exports plain GPX.

GPS & navigation

• Selectable source: serial NMEA receiver, USB dongle via gpsd, sim, or (later) MAVLink — all normalized to one fix. Setup frees the header UART (Raspberry Pi OS parks a login console on it) and counts arriving sentences, so a receiver can be verified indoors where there will never be a fix.
• Home point, manual or auto on the first good fix. The OSD shows fix + satellites and, once home is set, distance and direction back.

Operation & setup

• Mobile data budget: counts every metered uplink (LTE stick, phone hotspot, tethered laptop) and shows ⚠ DATA past a set share of the plan. The vehicle's own hotspot and VPN interfaces are excluded — free and double-counted respectively. A HiLink stick's own billing month can be used instead. Survives reboots.

• Link gaps: a watchdog trip lasts one control tick and is gone before it can be read. The status strip counts the episodes per connection and the longest wait for a frame.

• Graphical setup page on the vehicle (/setup): driver, cameras, telemetry, watchdog, Wi-Fi, LTE, remote access, security — from a phone, no screen needed. Wi-Fi onboarding: scan, pick, connect; the hotspot returns if the password was wrong, and can be kept up next to LTE. The ground app has a Setup ↗ shortcut.

  

  Tabs — Overview · Network · Remote access · Sensors & outputs · Camera · GPS · Design, each one a URL (…/setup#gps). Overview answers "is everything there?" on one screen.

• Remote access, one method: Tailscale, ZeroTier or WireGuard — upload the .conf from your server or FritzBox, or type the values in. Up at boot.

• Robust LTE: APN, SIM PIN, APN user/password, 4G-only mode, roaming toggle, raw mmcli diagnostics, PIN change/remove. autoconnect redials by itself.

• HiLink sticks too (Huawei E3372h-320 & co.). They are routers, invisible to mmcli, so YonderRC reads the stick's own API for state, operator and signal. Found through the routing table, never by interface name; its config page is proxied through the vehicle on port 8081.

• Native driver modules install from the browser: i2c-bus, pigpio, serialport, one button each. A failed build is translated into a cause and the fixing command.

• The Wi-Fi radio fixes itself: Pi OS keeps it rfkill-blocked until a Wi-Fi country is set, and NetworkManager only says "device is not available". Setup unblocks it.

• Update from the setup page: check shows the incoming commits; update pulls, installs dependencies, rebuilds the control app and restarts.

• Guided hardware self-test: channel sweep, read sensors, camera snapshot.

• The vehicle reports its own condition: ⚠ POWER in the OSD while the 5 V rail sags (a brownout reset is indistinguishable from a crash from the ground), plus SoC temperature, load, uptime and free card space on the overview. The clock is flagged only when it is wrong — a Pi with no battery-backed clock boots into the past and git pull then fails with a certificate error that never mentions the time.

• Shut down from the page. Pulling power mid-write is how an SD card dies. Refused while armed.

• Factory reset for the vehicle and the ground app.

• Self-sufficient in the field: the Pi starts its own hotspot whenever the radio is free and opens the page via a captive portal.

• Hardware drivers PCA9685 / GPIO-PWM / SBUS (native libs optional), non-blocking ESC calibration.

• Desktop app (Electron) with native SDL2 input (hot-plug, rumble).

Measured in the field (2026-08-21, one afternoon, one carrier, one location — not a benchmark): Pi 4 on a Huawei E3372h-320 with its internal antenna, controlled from a laptop over Tailscale, Ethernet unplugged.

Control round-trip	110 ms
Video latency	128 ms
Bitrate	444 kbps
LTE signal	52 % (≈ −106 dBm RSRP)
Path	direct IPv6, no DERP relay

Link health read 52 and named SIGNAL as the limiting part. Failsafe fired and cleared as designed while the link moved from Wi-Fi to LTE.

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Quick start

Requires Node 20+.

npm install
npm run dev

• Vehicle service: ws://localhost:8080 (sim driver), setup at /setup.
• Ground station: http://localhost:5173.

Press Connect, hold Arm for 1 s, drive with W A S D / arrow keys. From a phone open http://<PC-LAN-IP>:5173.

Video in the sim (synthetic test pattern, needs ffmpeg):

npm run dev            # terminal 1: vehicle + ground app
npm run dev:video      # terminal 2: go2rtc with the test pattern

Mind the order — npm run dev writes the go2rtc config first. Fedora: sudo dnf install -y openh264 ffmpeg-free.

Tests:

npm test               # safety / logic test suite

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On real hardware

Parts list, wiring and the step-by-step build are in docs/HARDWARE.md.

Quickest (one line on Raspberry Pi OS Lite):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TechnikWeber/YonderRC/main/provisioning/bootstrap.sh | bash

Clones to /opt/yonderrc and runs the installer. Then open http://<pi-ip>:8080/setup and press Detect hardware: it reads each I²C chip's ID register, so it names the actual part (INA228, MCP9808, BME280, and the PCA9685 through its all-call address) instead of guessing from a shared address. One button fills those into the forms, and the native module a suggestion needs installs from the same page.

1. Copy the repo onto the Pi (/opt/yonderrc) — one way is enough:

# a) git clone (if the Pi has internet)
sudo mkdir -p /opt/yonderrc && sudo chown $USER /opt/yonderrc
git clone https://github.com/TechnikWeber/YonderRC.git /opt/yonderrc

# b) scp from the laptop (copy your local repo to the Pi) — run on the LAPTOP:
scp -r ~/YonderRC pi@yonderrc.local:/tmp/YonderRC
ssh pi@yonderrc.local 'sudo mkdir -p /opt/yonderrc && sudo cp -a /tmp/YonderRC/. /opt/yonderrc/'

# c) USB stick (Pi with no network) — insert the stick, then on the Pi:
sudo mkdir -p /opt/yonderrc && sudo cp -a /media/*/YonderRC/. /opt/yonderrc/   # check the path via lsblk

2. Install and configure:

sudo bash /opt/yonderrc/provisioning/install.sh   # Node, ffmpeg, go2rtc, systemd, I2C/UART
# then configure graphically at  http://<pi>:8080/setup

Driver selection via env (details in docs/HARDWARE.md):

YRC_DRIVER=pca9685 npm run start -w @yonderrc/vehicle   # I2C PWM, 16 channels
YRC_DRIVER=gpio-pwm npm run start -w @yonderrc/vehicle   # pigpio; pins: docs/HARDWARE.md 2.8
YRC_DRIVER=sbus     npm run start -w @yonderrc/vehicle   # SBUS to a flight controller

A hardware driver that fails to start falls back to sim, so a headless device never becomes unconfigurable.

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Project layout

packages/
  protocol/   shared TypeScript types (wire messages, channels, profiles, telemetry)
  vehicle/    vehicle service (Node/tsx): core, failsafe, drivers, sensors, go2rtc, setup
  ground/     ground station (React): control, FPV, OSD, recording, setup UI
  desktop/    Electron shell with native SDL2 input
docs/HARDWARE.md   hardware guide
provisioning/      Pi setup (systemd, LTE, Tailscale, hotspot/onboarding)
test/              test suite (npm test)

Everything above the transport is transport-agnostic; control travels over WebSocket (fallback + signaling) or the WebRTC data channel.

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Versions

Changes are in CHANGELOG.md and the GitHub releases. This README always describes the current state.

How this code was written

YonderRC is written with AI assistance — the bulk of the code was produced by Anthropic's Claude from the author's specifications, and every change is reviewed and accepted by a human before it ships. Commits carry a Co-Authored-By: Claude trailer.

What that means for how much you should trust it:

• Everything is covered by the test suite (npm test) and all four packages typecheck. Safety logic — failsafe, disarmed values, arming, channel maths, the pre-arm check — is written as pure functions so it can be tested without hardware.
• The simulator path is genuinely verified. The hardware path is not. Real drivers, I²C registers, nmcli/mmcli, LTE and WebRTC reconnect can only be proven on a Pi. Those places say so rather than pretending otherwise.
• Review it yourself before you trust it with a vehicle.

There is no standard for disclosing AI involvement in a codebase — no SPDX field, no licence header. The conventions that exist are commit trailers (Co-Authored-By:) and a plain statement like this one. This project uses both.

Disclaimer — safety & legal

YonderRC controls physical vehicles and can cause property damage, injury or death. It is provided "as is", without any warranty, and the author accepts no liability.

• FPV and beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) operation is restricted or prohibited in many countries and may require registration, a licence or a spotter. Check your local laws (aviation, radio, privacy) before you use it.
• Keep the failsafe and arming safeguards enabled, test in the simulator and on the bench first, stay away from people and property, and never rely on the link alone.
• You use YonderRC entirely at your own risk. See LICENSE.

License

PolyForm-Noncommercial-1.0.0 plus one addition: no military or warfare use. Use, modify and share it for free, modified or not; no commercial and no military use. Notes and third-party components: NOTICE.md.