13.1.3. Connecting a camera

Every session starts at the connect button – the plug icon at the bottom of the left toolbar, or Ctrl+E. Click it and the IDE scans the USB serial ports for cameras and connects to the one it finds. With more than one camera attached, a dialog asks which serial port to use, preselecting your previous pick; with none, the IDE says so and offers a recovery path for a camera that no longer enumerates (see Firmware updates and recovery).

13.1.3.1. What happens on connect

Connecting is more than opening a serial port. The IDE identifies the board, reads its firmware version, and compares it against the release bundled with the IDE. If the camera’s firmware is older, a prompt offers to update it – this prompt is how cameras normally get firmware updates. The update dialog has checkboxes to also erase the internal flash filesystem and to reset the ROM file system; both start off and remember your last choice, and neither is normally needed for an update. After the first successful connect the IDE also shows a one-time dialog explaining what the camera’s LED blink colours mean.

A camera attached in bootloader (DFU) mode rather than as a normal serial device gets its own dialog on connect, with options to install the latest release firmware, load a specific firmware file, erase the internal flash filesystem, or edit or reset the ROM file system.

The IDE reports platform quirks too. On Windows, it checks the system device list during connect and reports any USB driver problems it finds, naming the devices involved. On Linux, a permission error opening the serial port almost always means your user is not in the dialout group – the error dialog shows the exact adduser command that fixes it.

13.1.3.2. The status bar

Once connected, the status bar along the bottom right of the window becomes the camera’s dashboard:

  • Board – the board type reported by the camera.

  • Sensor – the attached camera sensor module.

  • Firmware Version – the running firmware version. Click it to re-check the version against the bundled release and update if a newer one is available.

  • Serial Port – the port the connection is using.

  • Drive – the flash-drive mount point associated with the camera. Click it to open the drive in your file manager; when several candidate drives are attached, the IDE asks which one belongs to the camera and remembers the answer per serial port. A camera connects and runs scripts fine without a drive association – only the drive-dependent actions, like opening the drive folder and saving a script as main.py, stay disabled until one is set.

  • FPS – the rate at which frames are arriving at the IDE. This is the preview rate, not necessarily the camera’s capture rate – a script can run faster than the USB link can stream its frames.

Disconnecting is forgiving. Clicking disconnect is the tidy way out, but unplugging the cable works too – the IDE notices the camera is gone (or has stopped responding) and disconnects on its own.

13.1.3.3. Auto reconnect

Tools → Auto Reconnect to OpenMV Cam makes connection fully automatic: whenever a camera appears on USB the IDE connects to it, and the manual connect and disconnect buttons are disabled while the option is on. With one camera and one IDE this is the convenient mode – plug the camera in and it is connected. Turn it off when you are juggling several cameras or sharing the port with another program.

The related Tools → Stop Script on Connect/Disconnect option (on by default) halts any running script when the IDE attaches or detaches, so a freshly connected camera is always in a known idle state. Turn it off to let a camera keep executing its stored script while the IDE connects to observe it.