Nebulus

Nebulus is a pure-Rust OpenIPC FPV ground station built with egui. It opens a supported Realtek USB WiFi adapter, reconstructs WFB video, decodes H.264 or H.265 with the operating system's video API, and always presents the newest decoded frame.

It shares the same Rust application, protocol pipeline, settings, metrics, and UI across desktop, Android, and the browser. Only USB access and video-surface presentation are target-specific.

Nebulus is the primary ground station distributed by this repository. Tagged releases include Linux x64/arm64 executables, macOS Apple Silicon/Intel disk images, Windows x64/arm64 installers, and one universal Android APK. The hosted browser build is available at nebulus.openipc-rs.neels.dev. The source package is published at crates.io/crates/nebulus.

Run On Desktop

cargo run -p nebulus --bin nebulus --release

Or install the published package from crates.io:

cargo install nebulus
nebulus

On Linux, install the VA-API build dependencies listed in the openipc-video README. The app uses nusb directly; it does not need the Tauri backend or the devourer library.

macOS and Windows builds add a Nebulus system-tray icon. Its menu can show or hide the window, start or stop RX, enable VPN for the next receiver start, open the full VPN panel, and quit. macOS displays it in the menu bar; Windows uses the notification area and may place it under the overflow arrow.

After monitor initialization succeeds, Settings shows a connected-receiver summary with the actual USB VID:PID, probed Realtek family, RF path layout, cut revision, USB speed, selected bulk endpoints, initialization result, firmware download status, and active RF/Link ID configuration. The summary is cleared when the receiver disconnects.

The GUI tab contains presentation-only settings. It offers Catppuccin Latte, Frappé, Macchiato, and Mocha themes, a persistent 75–150% interface scale, video telemetry-overlay visibility, control-panel visibility, and a one-click GUI reset. Theme and scale changes apply immediately on desktop, Android, and the browser.

Run In A Browser

Install Trunk, then serve the app from a secure context or localhost:

rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown
cargo install trunk --locked
cd apps/nebulus
trunk serve --release --open

Press Start RX to open the browser's WebUSB device picker. Browser builds use the same Rust Realtek initialization and WFB/FEC/RTP pipeline as native builds. WebCodecs performs H.264/H.265 decoding and WebGL uploads the retained browser VideoFrame directly, without copying decoded pixels through WASM.

Create deployable files with:

cd apps/nebulus
trunk build --release

The output is written to apps/nebulus/dist/ and is intentionally ignored by Git.

Build For Android

Nebulus uses NativeActivity; it does not need a Kotlin application shell. After installing the Android SDK, NDK, and cargo-apk2, run from the repository root:

./scripts/android-nebulus-dev.sh

This starts or reuses an emulator, waits for boot completion, selects the Rust target matching the AVD ABI, builds and installs Nebulus, and follows Logcat. Use --help for AVD, release, cold-boot, and no-Logcat options.

To only build the library target:

rustup target add aarch64-linux-android
cargo install cargo-apk2 --locked
cargo apk2 build -p nebulus --lib --target aarch64-linux-android

The manifest metadata requests android.hardware.usb.host. At runtime the Rust JNI bridge uses Android UsbManager to request permission and open the adapter, duplicates its file descriptor, and hands that descriptor to nusb::Device::from_fd. All later USB control and bulk transfers still run through nusb and openipc-rtl88xx.

Rust log output is mirrored to standard Android application output and the in-app Logs tab.

That command creates an installable APK with the normal Android debug key. Add [package.metadata.android.signing.release] keystore settings outside source control before adding --release for distribution builds.

Data Path

USB bulk IN
  -> openipc-rtl88xx RX descriptor parsing
  -> openipc-core 802.11 filtering, WFB crypto, FEC, RTP depacketizing
  -> openipc-video platform H.264/H.265 decoder
  -> newest decoded frame
  -> platform GPU presenter

Desktop and Android run USB, protocol, and decode work on a dedicated Rust worker thread. The egui event loop only updates state and uploads the newest presentable frame. The browser keeps WebUSB and WebCodecs on its local async executor because browser handles are not Send. Rust/WASM submits compressed access units directly to the browser WebCodecs API; application-written JavaScript callbacks are not part of the receive path.

Enabled payload routes share the receiver's WFB runtimes whenever they use the same channel and key slot. The default mixed-audio route therefore taps Opus RTP payload type 98 from the video channel without decrypting or FEC-decoding the packet twice. Opus decoding uses the pure-Rust ropus implementation. CPAL feeds native and Android audio devices; browser builds schedule PCM with Web Audio. Output volume can be adjusted while the receiver is running and is applied to every active audio route without restarting RX.

Pending frame events use a one-frame replacement slot. USB buffers are re-armed before decode or route work, encoded frames move into the decoder without a playback copy, and diagnostic batches are emitted at 20 Hz. Rendering stalls therefore drop old pictures instead of growing a delayed playback queue. Codec configuration and keyframe detection share one allocation-free Annex-B scan. The macOS path also converts the normal uniquely owned Annex-B buffer to VideoToolbox length prefixes in place.

Adaptive-link/VPN transmit and Jaguar3 maintenance do not run on the native RX thread. Browser adaptive feedback uses a retained bounded WebUSB OUT queue, and browser Jaguar3 maintenance runs as a separate local async task. Auxiliary TX is dropped under sustained overload rather than delaying incoming video.

The default Metrics view focuses on six operational signals: best-path link score, unrecoverable post-FEC loss, FEC recovery percentage, encoded video bitrate, delivered video FPS, and local receive-through-decode processing latency. Loss and recovery use deltas from each sampling window rather than lifetime counters, so old link damage does not distort the current graph.

On macOS, Linux, and Windows, Nebulus keeps decoder-native frames in a latest-only queue, uploads NV12 Y and UV planes into persistent wgpu textures, and converts to RGB in the GPU shader. This avoids CPU color conversion and reduces a 1080p upload from about 8.3 MB of RGBA to 3.1 MB of NV12. Linux maps the newest VA-API DMA surface and Windows reads the newest D3D11 surface only after stale frames have been discarded. Direct IOSurface, DMA-BUF, and D3D11 texture import remain optional future zero-copy optimizations.

Android sends MediaCodec output directly to a SurfaceTexture backed by an external OpenGL ES texture. The egui Glow paint callback latches the newest decoder image, so decoded planes are never mapped or copied through Rust. The browser keeps WebCodecs VideoFrame objects inside Rust/WASM and uploads them directly into a persistent WebGL texture; decoded pixel arrays never cross the WASM boundary.

Desktop builds request non-vsynced wgpu presentation with one frame of surface latency. Android requests its fastest same-resolution display mode, disables egui vsync, raises the receive thread priority, and configures MediaCodec for low latency. Physical Android devices retain a three-frame decoder bound; the SDK emulator alone gets a larger allowance for Goldfish's delayed software codec. Native audio requests a 256-frame output buffer and keeps no more than 40 ms of queued PCM.

Included Controls

• Supported-adapter discovery and refresh
• RF channel, width, offset, link ID, epoch, and USB transfer size
• Built-in default gs.key, native file picker, and key-file drop
• Optional RTP reorder buffer
• Adaptive-link quality tracking, uplink feedback, and TX power override
• H.264/H.265 playback, video-only fullscreen, and link OSD
• Keyframe-aligned H.264/H.265 MP4 recording without re-encoding
• Live bitrate, receive/decode/render FPS, RSSI, loss, and latency plots
• Pipeline-health, RTP, per-stage latency, and environment diagnostics
• Level-controlled library logging with target/text filtering and trace capture
• Configurable inspect, rate-limited log, audio, and UDP payload routes
• Opus playback with volume, queue depth, and decoder/error metrics
• Native OpenIPC VPN/TUN bridging on macOS, Linux, Windows, and Android
• Catppuccin Macchiato theme and persisted receiver settings

UDP forwarding and VPN/TUN are native-only. Their controls are unavailable in browser builds. Android requests VpnService consent and passes the resulting TUN file descriptor into the same Rust bridge used by desktop targets.

Recording writes the original encoded access units and the first enabled Opus audio route into MP4 without re-encoding. It waits for an H.264/H.265 keyframe, so the result begins at a valid random-access point. Video and audio timing come from their RTP clocks. Native muxing runs on a bounded recorder worker; browser recordings download when stopped. Both targets cap retained encoded media at 512 MiB.

The VPN tab bridges recovered IP packets from radio port 0x20 into a native L3 interface at 10.5.0.3/24. Packets read from that interface are encrypted, FEC-wrapped, injected through the userland Realtek driver, and transmitted on radio port 0xa0. Linux may require elevated network-device permissions; Windows uses Wintun through rust-tun; Android uses its system VpnService.

The Windows release installer includes the matching wintun.dll. A cargo install nebulus installation detects when the DLL is absent and shows Install Wintun in the VPN tab. Nebulus downloads the official signed 0.14.1 archive, verifies its published SHA-256, and installs the architecture-matched DLL under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Nebulus\wintun\0.14.1. The installer runs outside the receiver thread. Adaptive-link feedback injects WFB packets directly through the Realtek driver and does not require Wintun or an enabled VPN route.

Debug native and WASM builds also show Codec mock. It loops embedded, pre-recorded 1920x1080 H.264 and 48 kHz Opus fixtures, packetizes both tracks as RTP, and interleaves them on their media clocks. Native debug builds can start it automatically for profiling:

NEBULUS_CODEC_MOCK=1 cargo run -p nebulus --bin nebulus

Video passes through the normal RTP depacketizer and openipc-video; audio passes through the configured mixed-audio RTP tap, ropus, and the normal output queue. The native build uses its platform video decoder and WASM uses WebCodecs decoding; neither mock uses an encoder. Release builds omit the button and mock assets.

Validate

cargo fmt --all --check
cargo clippy -p nebulus --all-targets --no-deps -- -D warnings
cargo test -p nebulus --all-targets
cargo check -p nebulus --target wasm32-unknown-unknown
cargo check -p nebulus --target aarch64-linux-android --lib

License

MIT