Hi Everyone!

We've got a big one today! OpenMV IDE v5.1.0 is out along with OpenMV firmware v5.0.1.

Firmware v5.0.1

Firmware v5.0.1 is mostly a cleanup release on top of v5.0.0. That said, there are a few things worth knowing about:

• The sensor module is now a Python wrapper over the csi module. Your old scripts will keep running, but, importing sensor now prints a deprecation warning. If you haven't moved over to the csi module yet, now's the time.
• CAN on the OpenMV N6 and RT1602. machine.CAN works on the N6 and RT1062 now!
  

Other than that, there's a big batch of bug fixes across the camera drivers (Bayer capture on the N6, PAG7936 exposure/gain, etc.), image saving, the protocol, and the requests library. Everything is listed in the firmware changelog.

OpenMV IDE v5.1.0

Now for the IDE! This is a feature release, and the big change is the pane under the frame buffer. It used to just be the histogram. Now there's a selector in its title bar that switches between the Histogram, Board Info, Memory, Statistics, and the new Channels view.

The Channels View

Okay, this is the one I'm most excited about. Your script can now publish named channels of data and controls, and OpenMV IDE renders them live!!! Labels, sliders, toggles, spin boxes, radio buttons, text boxes, push buttons, and so on. And... the controls write back to your script! So, you can build a quick control panel for your OpenMV Cam without writing any desktop code.

But, that's not all! Channels can also stream waveforms, like audio from the mic or data from the IMU, and the IDE plots them live with pan, zoom, triggers, markers, and even a spectrum analyzer. It looks amazing. Check it out:

There are depth maps too for time-of-flight sensors. And, every graph and map can be recorded to CSV, WAV, NumPy, or Edge Impulse JSON/CBOR files. So, if you need to collect training data with your OpenMV Cam you can now do it right from the IDE.

The Channels tutorial in the docs shows you how to set all this up. It's just a few lines of code on the camera side.

Other Big Stuff

• Frame Buffer Source Selector - cameras with more than one sensor (like the Multispectral Thermal Camera Module) now let you pick which sensor streams to the IDE. The JPG toggle is now a JPG/RAW mode selector too.
• Board Info, Memory, and Statistics views - see exactly what board you're connected to, live graphs of the MicroPython heap and memory pools, and protocol stats.
  
• Third Party Repositories - this one is for companies building products on the OpenMV Cam. You can now publish your own boards, firmware, examples, models, and code completion stubs, and OpenMV IDE will install them and keep them updated. Check out Preferences -> OpenMV -> Third Party Repositories.

And of course, bug fixes! We went through every change since v5.0.0 twice and fixed a bunch of issues in the firmware update, bootloader, and ROMFS paths.

The full list of changes is in the IDE changelog.

Visual Intelligence Summit

Finally! I'll be at Roboflow's Visual Intelligence Summit in San Francisco on October 22nd talking about running vision models on microcontrollers. If you're in town, come through and say hi!

Register here: summit.roboflow.com

Anyway, that's all folks!