YOLO (You Only Look Once) is a powerful object detector that has come out in recent years. It would be really helpful to run on a drone for a lot of reasons that people are interested in: search and rescue, warehouse ops, robot helpers, etc. Also I wanted a chance to treat my thinkpad like a real field laptop. This is a simple way to do that using any DJI drone with a controller that outputs HDMI.

Hardware Needed:

• DJI Drone w/controller that outputs HDMI
• Mini HDMI to HDMI adapter
• HDMI USB capture device
• PC

I was relieved to find a USB capture device with Linux support, not many do.

YOLO

With all the hardware the easy part is cloning a github repo and running the script. OpenCV is able to recognize the USB capture device as a webcam, so really any CV app that you could come up with could use this.

Get the script here. (Disclaimer: I did not write this script)
Go to settings in the DJI Go app and set the output to be shared with the HDMI port.

DONE.