OpenMV MicroPython
16.3. Hardening for production¶
A hardened application keeps running unattended on hardware it cannot see. The pages in this section cover the runtime discipline that turns a working application into one that recovers from its own failures and leaves enough evidence behind to diagnose them later.
Four pieces, ordered so each one supports the next. Logging comes first because everything else writes to it. The watchdog handles hangs and records what it caught into the log. Filesystem hygiene keeps the log writes fast as the application accumulates records over months or years in the field. The security page closes with what flash readout protection covers and what the work to enable it actually looks like – relevant when the application code’s privacy is a product requirement.
The first three apply to every shipped cam. A missing watchdog is a hang nobody can recover from; missing logging is a crash that left no field evidence; missing filesystem hygiene is a flat directory of log files that took the frame rate down with it.
The fourth, readout protection, is situational. Many shipped cams sit in places where physical access is already controlled – factories, fixed installations, secured operator stations, behind locked enclosures – and the engineering cost of locking the firmware down is unjustified for those deployments. The page covers what the cost looks like when it is justified.