RunCam Mini FPV On-Board DVR for Racing Drones

DVRs (video recorders) have been around for ages, but recently there’s been new hype surrounding the use of on-board DVRs for recording your FPV camera footage. Using a GoPro has always been a great option for freestyling, but not so brilliant for those racing; they are too heavy and disrupt the tuning of your copter. Another alternative is to use the DVR built into your goggles, but then the recorded video doesn’t make brilliant watching given all of the breakup and noise.

The solution is a small on-board DVR like this one from RunCam. It’s light enough (3.5g) to be mounted to you quad without impacting upon performance and it will record without any interference/breakup! The recorded footage certainty isn’t HD quality, but neither is a standard FPV camera, and without signal breakup it makes surprising good watching. It will record 640 x 480 at 30fps for NTSC or 25fps for PAL. Most importantly it has been designed to not introduce any latency into your live video feed.

The installation is super easy, the DVR will mount on a 20mm x 20mm FC stack and there are solder pads to connect a camera / audio input on one side, and on the other sides outputs to your flight controller / OSD or directly to your VTX. It’s also simple to use, it automatically starts recording upon powering on and to stop recording you just press the button. If you hold the button for 5 seconds it will format the SD card.