Trouble Shooting. What if the VisionCam isn't working

My PortentaVisionCam was working fine, and now doesn’t. What are my steps to take. Unlike most microcontroller issues, I would assume I have messed up my wires. What would your typical steps be for trouble shooting. Presently I have

  1. The Portenta breaths green on button double press (DFU). I can install the OpenMV firmware.

  2. On single button press the portenta connects to OpenMV and I can run example main.py which flashes the onboard green LED

  3. The examples helloworld.py program needs RGB565 changed to GRAYSCALE which used to work but now doesn’t. Any Suggestions?

  4. My error is: RuntimeError: Capture Failed: -4

  5. Is there a test that gives feedback about the cameras connectivity. Sometimes it says the camera is connected, other times it says no cam.

P.S. I am really hard on software and hardware, so I could easily have done something bad.

Error 4 is a bad sign. It means the camera failed to be detected. I2C probing found no camera hardware. I would check your connection between the camera shield and the Arduino Portenta.

Given more folks seem to be getting this error more I think we’ll change these errors to strings. They generally don’t happen with our official hardware.

Anyway, to answer your points:

  1. Correct.
  2. Correction.
  3. Yes, you have to go to grayscale, we can make the firmware just ignore RGB565 being requested and output grayscale still. However, I imagine folks will get confused. So, it’s better we enforce only grayscale working.
  4. See above.
  5. The IDE gives feedback about the camera being detected and shows the camera type on the status bar. Typically this never has issues.