New trial of old Open MV M7 board

OpenMV Products
1

We’d bought an OpenMV a few years back from Sparkfun electronics (label = OpenMV MV3R2 US-MF-002 OV7725-M7 05/20/2017), but hadn’t had chance to test & shelved it. With a new need, tried getting it to connect today. I’m having issues getting the IDE to see it.

I installed IDE (Ver 2.9.7 on my windows 10 laptop). When plugged into my PC via a known good (data+power) USB cable, I heard my PC recognize it and it showed up as a USB drive on my PC. However, when I press the cable-looking ‘connect’ button in the OpenMV IDE lower left (Ctrl-E), I get a message “No OpenMV Cams found!”. When I click OK it asks Do you have an OpenMV Cam connected and is it bricked? If I press “Yes”, and select the Open MV Cam M7 (STM32F765/67) and press OK it ask if I want to erase the internal file system, I’ve tried both “Yes” and “No”. In either case, it seems to try to erase the PC by first asking me to unplug/replug the USB cable. When I do so the green LED blinks continuously and the IDE goes into Erasing… mode, but always ends in a “Timeout Error!” with the green LED still blinking.

I read some forum topics and thought maybe updating the bootloader was the thing to do. I chose the Tools… bootloader… menu and selected the file: “…OpenMV IDE\share\qtcreator\firmware\OPENMV3\firmware.bin” and pressed “Run” button. Again it continued with an erasing… while blinking green, with another timeout failure. This time, now I’m seeing no USB drive on my PC upon re-pluggin in the PCB USB cable (but still hear my PC beep like its recognizing a USB device), and after a couple seconds the blinking green on the board stops. It doesn’t show in the Windows Device manager as USB device anymore either.

The IDE seems to know when I plug in the cable as it moves from waiting to erasing mode, but can’t get it to connect and I seem to be progressing backwards.

Wondering if there is a way to get this board to a state where it can connect or if maybe its too old for the new IDE?

2

No, it’s fine. The camera can work with the IDE.

However, we did update the bootloader to use a much faster protocol which might not work on everyone’s computers. I’ve gotten bug reports of this.

So, install an older version of the IDE, like the last version and then update the camera, and then go back to the latest IDE.

If you want to help me debug a USB wireshark capture of what the camera is doing would be helpful to know what’s going on. Create a GitHub ticket for that and I’ll try to get the issue fixed.

3

I installed prior IDE version (2.9.2). Initially the IDE didn’t see the board, but this time the IDE did successfully erase it and program the board. I’m seeing it again as a drive in Windows and it connects and shows images. So thanks!

FYI, this morning prior to trying your IDE roll-back suggestion, I updated my USB drivers, as I’d remembered I had ‘rolled back’ the driver for compatibility with some older equipment in the lab. That didn’t help with the 2.9.7 IDE not connecting by the way.

After connecting the device with the old IDE, I installed the latest IDE (2.9.7) and it now sees the device and shows live video. Restarting software and re-plugging the device, it is seeing it OK also.

So- good news is your solution worked and I’m up and running. The bad news is your other suggested step of using a USB monitor to see what is happening during device erase step is probably not going to produce anything useful since (un)fortunately my OpenMV camera is working. Hopefully this written feedback can be helpful though.
Thanks again.

4

Cool, thanks for letting me know.