Received Firesale board

Hi All-
I’m happy to report that I received the OpenMV board purchased through the firesale and had a chance to play with it today.
My initial tests were using the IDE from github, launching the IDE from the command line on my fairly old MacBook Pro (had an issue getting the package to run, could be my old machine, will dig into that later). I got some of the basic examples to work (Hello World, face tracking and recognition, LCD). There were a few glitches, but I need to do some more testing before reporting or trying to fix any of them. It could be minor incompatibilities with the old version of OSX I have running, could be something that Ibrahim has already fixed and pushed to github in the last few hours since I was playing with it, could be things that have already been fixed in firmware and that I just need to update; nothing I’m worried about yet.
Understanding that most of the development was done in Linux, I’m going to run the IDE on an Ubuntu box tomorrow and see how it works there; that will give me an indication if there is anything that is expected to work in Linux that I might be able to help to resolve for OSX.
One thing that would help- and it is possible that it is documented somewhere obvious and I just haven’t seen it yet- would be instructions for building and updating the firmware. I am pretty familiar with MicroPython development (though not a master coder by any stretch!) and I would be interested in digging into the openmv extensions to MicroPython.

Cheers,
Bryan

Oh yeah, there’s tons of bugs. If you read the tutorial I put up I go into depth about what I’ve found.

Anyway, as for getting the development environment going just read the wiki on the openmv git hub repo. Here: GitHub - openmv/openmv: OpenMV Camera Module. Read the wiki for linux development: Home · openmv/openmv Wiki · GitHub

I’m pretty committed to getting this KickStarter done and I really want this product to be awesome so I’m going to be fixing issues and updating features like crazy the next few months.

As for the code structure - Ibrahim is basically just using MicroPython as a library. So, everything that he’s done is here: openmv/src/omv at master · openmv/openmv · GitHub.

The py folder contains all the python to C bindings, the img folder contains all the image code (beware - magic in there), and the top level is all the glue stuff to make everything work.

As for the all the I/O control, that’s in the https://github.com/iabdalkader/micropython/tree/openmv/stmhal folder. Most of that stuff is directly from MicroPython, but, we’ve tweaked it a bit.

If you’re really interested in fixing a few things I’m happy to add you to my skype. Send me an email in that case. Then you can bug me whenever I’m on my PC (usually night EST).

Thanks Kwabena, I may take you up on the Skype offer.

For now, I can report that I got the IDE up and running on Ubuntu (after figuring out the dependencies to install, and no, I wasn’t on the ball to make a list as I was doing it…) It does seem to be generally more stable on Ubuntu than on my mac, but I haven’t tracked down why that is just yet.

I was also able to build the firmware from the current master on GitHub (the only catch was looking up how to activate the MicroPython submodule within the OpenMV repository - a neat trick which I hadn’t used before.) It built correctly, and I uploaded the new firmware using the IDE. With that I was able to try out Ibrahim’s latest fixes to the MLX code; happy to say that the MLX example worked nicely.

I’ll take some time to look into the links you sent, and generally follow the development and see what, if anything, I can help fix.

Cheers,
Bryan

I got mine. I build a new ubuntu machine for it. I flashed it using the latest version with the DFU but it does not run for more than a few minutes.
I can connect to it using screen and it works quite well for a few minutes then the serial seems to simply stop.
The same with the demos and the IDE started from git at the head. Most of the time the IDE complains about the version of the board but if I connect to it using screen first, exit quickly and start up the idea, I got as far as running the ‘hello world’ for about 30 seconds to try and focus the lens before it just died.
It’s going back on the shelf now.

Hi, can you use this new release here?

There are some serious bugs with the old firmware, but, for v1.2 the system should be stable now. We’re still fixing issue however. We’ll have a final release for KickStarter by sometime in May.

Also, if you’re on linux and you installed the dev environment and updating the firmware via the IDE is giving you issues please put the board into DFU mode and try using the make flash option to reprogram it.

I’ll give the newer firmware a try tomorrow. I have only ever flashed it using the DFU. My main server does not run X so the DFU is easy. I just built a laptop with XCFE to try the IDE.

K, Unbuntu works great without issues also.