v4.4.5

v4.4.5 adds firmware loading and recovery for the new Alif Ensemble (OpenMV Cam AE3) boards, ships complete localized UI translations across the full bundled language set, and grows the bundled model zoo with a large DeGirum collection and a new Qualcomm AI Hub vendor section. The release stays on the Qt Creator 14.0.2 base. A few menu items and developer command-line options were removed; see Breaking changes.

Highlights

  • Alif Ensemble (OpenMV Cam AE3) support lets you load and recover firmware on the new AE3 boards directly from the IDE, including a guided recovery flow for bricked boards.

  • Localized UI translations are now complete across the full bundled language set, including OpenMV-specific dialog strings.

  • DeGirum model zoo adds a large collection of YOLOv5n/YOLOv5nu/YOLOv8n variants plus a new Model Zoo landing page.

  • Qualcomm AI Hub models add a new Qualcomm vendor section with 16 quantized models across 15 model families (YOLOv8-Detection, Yolo-NAS, Yolo-v7, DeepLabV3+ MobileNet, MediaPipe Face, MiDaS, MobileNet v2/v3, PoseNet, ShuffleNet v2, SqueezeNet, GoogLeNet, and more), plus new Qualcomm and Google vendor landing pages.

  • Camera USB drive matching now selects the exact removable drive for the connected camera by serial number on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

  • Fixed a crash when the helloworld script was rewritten for the connected sensor.

New features

  • Added the ability to load and recover firmware on the new Alif Ensemble (OpenMV Cam AE3) boards directly from the IDE, using bundled Alif command-line tools and a dedicated UART/DFU recovery bootloader. The flow uses an internal, hidden OpenMV Cam AE3 SBL board entry (VID:PID 37C5:16E3) that is not exposed as a selectable board in the connection dropdown (e896a475b, c386a2680, b2834df07, 2df2a5535, 3079df0e4).

  • Corrupted or bricked Alif boards can now be reset and re-flashed via a guided recovery flow that prompts you to enable the hard maintenance mode switch (if not already on) and press the board’s user button during the maintenance-mode handshake (ec69240ab, 2fb7f9fde).

  • OpenMV IDE now ships complete localized UI translations across its full bundled language set, including OpenMV-specific dialog strings, generated via a new auto-translation pipeline (60228d5cb, b2e8cece4, 5d5fc17e9, 5d2ad4e64, 43453aadd).

  • Added a large DeGirum model-zoo collection (YOLOv5n/YOLOv5nu/YOLOv8n variants for car, coco, face, hand, license-plate, person, age, gender, fruit, ppe, head, and pose/keypoint detection) plus a new Model Zoo landing page (e39989251).

  • Added a new Qualcomm AI Hub vendor section with 16 quantized models across 15 model families (YOLOv8-Detection, Yolo-NAS, Yolo-v7, deeplabv3_plus_mobilenet, foot_track_net, gear_guard_net, googlenet, mediapipe_face detector and landmark detector, midas, mobilenet_v2, mobilenet_v3_large, posenet_mobilenet, shufflenet_v2, and squeezenet1_1), added new Qualcomm and Google vendor landing pages, and reorganized Google MobileNet v1 models out of a classification subfolder (2fbb806bd).

Other changes and improvements

  • When copying scripts to a camera’s USB drive, the IDE now selects the exact removable drive belonging to the connected camera by matching its serial number, instead of guessing among all mounted FAT volumes, on Windows, Linux, and macOS (ef28da191, db98bc4b0, 9ee631e6f, d6b2a0976, 3b3c4c9a2).

  • Drive/USB serial-number lookups and serial-port scanning were moved onto the existing drive-scan worker thread so the IDE UI stays responsive during connection (bcc78d48e, 3b3c4c9a2).

  • Added initial (currently disabled) plumbing for a variable get_state payload size that would distinguish high-speed (511 bytes) from full-speed (63 bytes) USB. The code is present but gated off via an if (0) branch, so get_state still uses the original fixed 64-byte payload and there is no user-visible behavior change in this release (31c2e2990).

  • Corrected the flash-erase address for the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect (legacy) bootloader from 0x10800000 to 0x10200000 (132047c14).

  • Removed the CNN Network Library tool that copied a model file to the OpenMV Cam from the Machine Vision Tools menu (07f83ce69).

  • Hid the camera Configure Settings dialog menu action (064fb3d83).

  • Removed several developer/debug command-line options (-settingspath, -installsettingspath, -pluginpath, and -temporarycleansettings/-tcs) from the application, leaving only -language for end users (86d009d65).

Bug fixes

  • Fixed an IDE crash that occurred when the helloworld script was rewritten for the connected sensor; the file is now reloaded from disk instead of calling setPlainText (5793b3120).

  • Fixed Python paste indentation so pasted code is no longer over-indented past the indentation level of the preceding line (8622327d9).

  • Fixed the output (serial terminal) pane so it is restored to its visible/hidden state on startup, and stopped a context-menu popup on its toggle buttons (a972ecdf5).

  • Fixed Alif device serial-port detection on macOS by only considering /dev/cu* ports and prefixing non-Windows port names with /dev/ (277fe0c05, 3079df0e4).

Platform and tool support

  • Qt Creator base: 14.0.2.

  • The GENX320 event camera is now recognized for the 01-Camera/03-Event-Cameras example set, so GENX320 boards see those examples (7fd3c141c).

  • Added bundled Alif flashing tools (share/qtcreator/alif version 1.100.0 for linux-x86_64, mac, and windows) and a new OPENMV_AE3 recovery firmware/bootloader package, used internally by the AE3 firmware load and recovery flow.

  • OpenMV IDE version bumped from 4.4.4 to 4.4.5.

Breaking changes

User-visible workflow changes between v4.4.4 and v4.4.5:

  • The CNN Network Library entry under the Machine Vision Tools menu (which let you copy a .tflite/.network/.txt model file directly to the OpenMV Cam) was removed, and the camera Configure Settings dialog action is now hidden. Users relying on those menu items will no longer find them.

  • The command-line options -settingspath, -installsettingspath, -pluginpath, and -temporarycleansettings/-tcs are no longer accepted by the application (only -language remains). Scripts or shortcuts relying on these flags will no longer take effect.