13.2. OpenMV Viewer#

OpenMV Viewer is the read-only companion to OpenMV IDE. Where the IDE is for building an application on an OpenMV Cam, the Viewer is for showing off a finished one: it connects to a camera, runs its script, and streams the live frame buffer, serial output, and histogram – but the development tools are gone. A customer, a colleague, or a booth visitor can watch what a product does without the full editor, the machine-vision tuning tools, or the settings that only matter while building it.

The Viewer installs and runs on its own, separately from OpenMV IDE, and the two can be installed side by side.

The OpenMV Viewer main window with a camera connected and its script running.

The window keeps the parts of OpenMV IDE that show what the camera is doing. The frame buffer viewer shows what the camera last captured, the serial terminal below shows everything the script prints, and the histogram plots the pixel statistics of the frame. The connect and run controls sit on the toolbar, and a status bar reports what the connected camera is doing. What is missing is everything you would use to change the application: the script-authoring features, the machine-vision tuning tools, the AI and model tools, and the IDE’s own developer settings are all removed.

One editing tool does stay, because it is aimed at whoever uses a product rather than whoever built it. The Viewer can open the settings config stored on the connected camera and present it as a form, so an operator can change a product’s settings – a threshold, a mode, a Wi-Fi password – without the IDE. It opens an existing config only; authoring one is a job for the IDE. See the settings editor for what a config can hold.

Keyboard shortcuts in this chapter are written for Windows and Linux; on macOS substitute Cmd for Ctrl.

Using the viewer

Seeing what the camera sees

Maintaining the camera

Wrap up