v5.1.0#

v5.1.0 is a feature release. The pane under the frame buffer grows from a histogram into a set of live views – Board Info, Memory, Statistics, and the new Channels view that turns the values a script publishes into widgets, graphs, spectra, and depth maps and records them to files – the frame buffer gets a source selector for multi-sensor cameras, the IDE learns to load third-party repositories of boards, firmware, examples, models, and stubs, and video recordings switch to H.264. New boards and sensors are supported, the firmware tooling was hardened by a full audit of every change since v5.0.0, and a handful of behaviours were brought over from OpenMV Studio. It is built on Qt Creator 14.0.2 and bundles firmware v5.0.1.

Highlights#

  • Pane views – the histogram pane’s title bar gains a selector that switches the pane between the Histogram, Board Info (the connected camera’s hardware, versions, and capabilities), Memory (live graphs of the MicroPython heap and every UMA pool, with peak tracking), Statistics (the debug protocol’s packet, error, and per-channel event counters), and Channels views.

  • Channels view – a script can publish named channels of data and controls over the debug protocol, and the IDE renders them live: labels, toggles, sliders, spin boxes, radio buttons, line edits, selectors, push buttons, and text blocks that write back to the camera; waveform graphs with pan, zoom, markers, triggers, history, and a spectrum analyzer; and depth maps with the camera’s own palettes, three scaling filters, and tone mapping. Any graph or map records to CSV, WAV, NumPy, or Edge Impulse JSON and CBOR files – including a Record All for a whole channel – for training data collection. The last values stay on screen when a script stops.

  • Frame buffer source selector – cameras with more than one image sensor show a selector in the frame buffer’s title bar to choose which sensor streams to the IDE (or to turn streaming off), the JPG toggle became a JPG / RAW streaming-mode selector, and the pane’s title names the format each frame arrived in.

  • Third-party repositories – a vendor can publish a repository of boards, firmware (release and development channels), examples, machine-learning models, and .pyi stubs; the IDE installs it from a URL or from a folder an installer dropped in, merges it with its own content, keeps it updated, and lets you order vendors by priority. Managed from Preferences → OpenMV → Third Party Repositories.

  • New hardware – the OpenMV N6 Classic board (including its bootloader driver, udev rule, and ROM-DFU recovery entry) and the FLIR Lepton 3.1R and UW sensors.

  • H.264 recordings – the frame buffer recorder and the video converter now encode H.264 instead of MPEG-4 Part 2, with a pinned key-frame interval so recordings seek cleanly and the frame rate snapped to a whole number.

  • Audit fixes – every commit since v5.0.0 was reviewed twice for regressions, with particular attention to the firmware, bootloader, and ROMFS paths; the defects found are fixed in this release (see bug fixes).

New features#

  • Board Info, Memory, and Statistics views in the histogram pane, with full-bleed styling in both the dark and light themes and selectable text (cdea506655b, 7629a588db9, e21bd94a395, b55dcc412f6, fc744920011, e7dc3bf0092, 448e21db0bd).

  • Channels view – the complete control vocabulary (label, toggle, slider, spin box, radio, line edit, select, push button, text), waveform graphs with a spectrum analyzer (Hann, Hamming, Blackman, and rectangular windows, averaging, peak hold, log frequency), rising and falling-edge triggers, markers, history, and plot export; depth maps with the Depth, Rainbow, Ironbow, and Event palettes, nearest / bilinear / bicubic scaling, Script Range / Auto Range / Equalize tone mapping, a pause button, hover readout, a header with the declared range and the frame’s min / max / mean, and Save Image; recording to CSV, WAV, NumPy, and Edge Impulse JSON / CBOR with an optional Edge Impulse label, part splitting for long captures, and Record All; a Channel Polling interval in the protocol preferences (5b4f31a6b3a, d1252a24f14, bfd7fd72f94, d1c2ab02a5f, 4808b8ffe26, dfc323b4ec7, 61c077df9a5, 8c2cd6cf1f1, 1534225fcee).

  • Frame buffer source selector and format readout – choose the streaming sensor on multi-sensor cameras, or Off; the received frame format is shown in the pane’s title; the JPG toggle is now a JPG Mode / RAW Mode selector (e76284bde9e, c2baff8d60c, afece31cb6a, 76448d7b9dd).

  • Third-party repositories – file-driven firmware repositories merged with the built-in board list, network updates with a Preferences page, a development firmware channel per vendor, user-controlled vendor priority, vendor examples merged into File → Examples, vendor models merged into the Model Zoo, custom .pyi stubs fed to code completion, override warnings when a vendor shadows built-in content, and a license check for vendor boards (21a63a74949, b5512efe949, b15afdac479, 1fe693f0b61, ae11ffeffc4, cf47a37ba65, 100bdeb530b, 252924901f7, c75a81f2a4a, 3e7f077a738, 5c5aa3e657c, e3f36adbdcb, b04da8ee888).

  • Comment stripping before Run – comments are removed from the script before it is sent to the camera, saving camera RAM on comment-heavy scripts; lines are kept, so traceback line numbers still match the editor (677546ee033).

  • Inline error mark – when a script dies with an exception, the editor marks the offending line in red with the error text beside it; the mark clears when you edit the file, run again, or disconnect (677546ee033).

  • Drag and drop onto the ROMFS editor – files dropped from the desktop go through the same script compilation and model conversion as Add File, into the folder they were dropped on (677546ee033).

Editor, terminal, and UI improvements#

  • Histograms are computed from full 8-bit RGB instead of the camera’s RGB565 tables, with a shared plot palette, alpha-blended fills, and dimmer grid lines (238e099373e, f126e8f34c0, cebbf0c9e2c).

  • Hidden pane views do no work – the histogram skips its computation and replots while another view is showing or the pane is collapsed, and catches up when shown again; zero-size replots are silenced (c8730df8399).

  • Example scripts open with a blank line after the imports, and the bundled examples were reformatted the same way (1f88f617ec5, 87c8f7d41c7).

  • Code completion shows private names – the embedded language server no longer filters _-prefixed members, which the camera’s modules use (23ab5b38bb3).

  • macOS – the protocol-controls group boxes in the preferences are no longer cramped, item views are guarded against Cocoa accessibility crashes, Apple Silicon users are warned about the “Allow accessories to connect” security setting, and RT1062 users are warned when Input Monitoring is not granted (firmware updates need it); both warnings are shown after connect (7d7b69367bf, 69fe7ffc913, 742cb4d8c0b, 8890eb77834, 89646292e8d).

  • Viewer-mode shortcuts – stray shortcuts that broke viewer mode (and the regular IDE) were disabled, and viewer mode no longer persists its cleared shortcuts into the full IDE’s settings (251b422f642, 0d153671c1d).

  • Unknown sensors are named by chip id in the status bar so they can be identified and added to the sensor table (df561775b54).

Firmware, boards, and tools#

  • OpenMV N6 Classic support: board entry, Windows DFU driver and installer codes, Linux udev rule (4ff4a1f239d, bdd6c96ef47, 25fcdc13c6a, 7730b699f60).

  • FLIR Lepton 3.1R and UW sensor support (12c03024f3c).

  • IMX bootloader handoff – a pre-armed catcher claims the RT1062’s bootloader the instant it enumerates, replacing the spawn-per-probe loop that could miss the one-second window on a loaded host (3d8b63c6859).

  • Firmware zips – Load Custom Firmware accepts romfs-only bundles and bundles with no ROMFS, and custom or development firmware is staged for IMX boards already sitting in bootloader mode (b6f16f54c1a, 94d5fd5c30e).

  • Private staging directories for development / custom firmware, ROMFS editor images, and video-tool temporary files, so stale files from other processes can never be flashed or converted by mistake (939154501af, a288fe712e7, 5c8c717adec).

  • H.264 video – recordings and conversions encode H.264 with a pinned key-frame interval; a recorded frame rate near a whole number is snapped to it so players report 30 FPS rather than 29.97 (6ad1968341d, d62c110e155, bab488a54fe).

  • Resources zip checksum – the IDE’s resources update is verified against a SHA-256 published alongside the version (677546ee033).

  • Honest User-Agent on requests to OpenMV’s servers (c4279c0213e).

Bug fixes#

Two review passes over every change since v5.0.0 found and fixed the following (ccea3b17d01, 71826200611):

  • Firmware and bootloader paths – a Load Custom Firmware zip onto a board already in bootloader mode flashed the release build instead; the Alif recovery path now refuses a custom build rather than flashing the release; a bricked N6 Classic was repaired with the plain N6 bootloader and firmware; a stale third-party resource root could steer a bricked built-in board to vendor files; the IMX catcher could proceed to flash after it crashed, ignored Cancel while waiting for the flashloader, and left the serial port open after a cancel during arming; the N6 Classic bootloader had no udev rule; the Windows driver installer’s accepted exit codes had a typo.

  • ROMFS editor – Cancel during a ROMFS read reported “Failed to unpack ROMFS!” and waited ten seconds for a camera still in the bootloader; Cancel during a write ended silently with a possibly partial ROMFS; a dfu-util error during a write was reported as success; Cancel in the follow-up dialog discarded every edit; Auto Reconnect could connect underneath the open editor; Edit ROMFS while connected needlessly disconnected and reconnected first; converter temp directories leaked. After a cancelled operation the bootloader is now asked to leave DFU so the camera comes back on its own.

  • Third-party repositories – zip entries are validated before extraction (no path traversal or symlinks), part installs and reinstalls keep the old copy until the new one is in place, a rejected vendor board no longer takes the built-in board it overlapped down with it, a missing PID mask matched nothing at runtime, and base example / model index rows no longer capture same-named vendor files.

  • Frame buffer and sensors – the GENX320 event sensor (chip id above 0x80000000) disabled the frame buffer; a saved sensor selection did not survive a restart; the old “disable frame buffer” preference was not migrated; the stream-source command is gated on the protocol version; the focus metric froze while the histogram page was hidden; the frame format lingered in the title after disconnect.

  • Connect flow – the macOS warnings could swallow the “Yes” of the firmware-upgrade prompt; the Model Zoo always opened collapsed with no selection restored; the single-drive fallback for the camera’s drive was unreachable when the camera had been plugged in for more than ten seconds.

  • Channels view and recorder – hostile frame sizes could overflow the size checks; the Edge Impulse recorders reallocated on every chunk and are now capped at 64 MB per part; a schema with separators in names could index past the record list; duplicate records orphaned a running recorder; writes are dropped while the view is frozen; the channel list now refreshes on unregister and soft-reboot events.

  • Video – an odd user-entered width broke H.264 encoding on the libx264 builds; cancelled or failed .bin conversions left frames that the next run folded in.

  • Protocol – the read flush that runs before protocol detection is bounded (issue #336) (77cd13af76f); the camera-drive association no longer loses the race to other volumes (9877480c304).

  • A -Wdeprecated-copy warning in the serial port info wrapper (abcfaa8af5e).

Localization#

Platform and tool support#

  • Qt Creator base: 14.0.2.

  • OpenMV IDE version bumped to 5.1.0.

  • Bundled firmware: v5.0.1 (see the firmware changelog).

  • New boards and sensors: OpenMV N6 Classic; FLIR Lepton 3.1R and UW.

Breaking changes#

None for existing projects. The JPG toggle in the frame buffer’s title bar is now a JPG Mode / RAW Mode selector, and its old “disable frame buffer” setting is migrated into the new source selector’s Off entry. Comments are stripped from scripts before they run; a script that relies on reading its own source text at runtime should not.