A camera can drive a zoom lens and a pan/tilt base at once
A camera can now run a zoom block and the head it sits on at the same time,
even when the two are not on the same wire. ptz.head names the base's
protocol — Pelco-D today — and ptz.headPort says where to find it: the
lens's own serial port, a tty of its own, or — for a base behind a serial
gateway on the network — a tcp:// address with the gateway's host and
port. Sony VISCA zoom blocks are
a supported lens now, and such a block reports its own gain back to the
camera as an ISO, so the picture settings know what the lens is doing.
Tried on a XiongMai N51813L: a VISCA lens on UART0, a Pelco-D base behind a socat gateway, both driven from the WebUI pad. Read the new page before wiring anything — XiongMai's CN2 "485" port is 3.3 V TTL, not RS-485, and the page says what to do about it.
The camera denoises with a neural network, and we measured what it costs
A Hi3516CV610 with an NPU can now run a denoising network over the picture
before it is encoded, with isp.aibnr. The new
page says which
chip variants have the NPU, how to tell from socmodel, which model files
the ultimate firmware needs, and how to switch it on.
It also says plainly what you pay. Measured on an IMX662 at 1080p: the NPU
needs about 33 ms per frame, so a sensor running at 30 fps delivers 28, the
NPU sits at 94% busy, and free memory drops from 76 to 44 MB. Cap it with
isp.aibnrFps: 25 and the NPU drops to 82%. The outermost 8 pixels on each
side are cropped, because the denoiser leaves a faint pattern there. At five
megapixels the NPU would manage about 10 frames a second.
What the page does not claim: how much better a dark, detailed scene looks. That has not been measured yet, and it says so.
The white lamp got controls of its own
The white light is no longer tied to whatever the infrared pins do.
nightMode.whiteLightPin puts it on a plain GPIO pin, and on SigmaStar it
dims through the kernel's own PWM driver, with its frequency, limits and
curve set separately from the IR lamp's. colorToGray decides whether the
picture goes grey when the lamp is white. The keys are in the streamer's
page.
The WebUI followed: a White switch next to the others, the IR-cut switch now says which way is on, the lamp's pin appears on the pin map, and the four lamp switches fit on a phone.
The meter reader notices when it has misread a digit
Last week the camera learnt to read a meter's blinking pulse LED. The lab's Energomera reads its 1 and 2 as a 7, which is exactly the problem that breaks a reading — so the camera now checks the digits against the blinks. A reading further ahead than the pulses allow is ignored however often it repeats, the reading never goes backwards while the blinks are being counted, and a drum stuck on a digit counts as a stall while the pulses carry the number on. Two new metrics report both cases, and majestic-meters has them.
You can talk through the camera from an XM recorder
A camera on an XM NVR or in XMEye now carries audio both ways, so the operator can answer whoever is standing in front of it.
Handover works, on three cells at once
Last week this section said the scheduler was still being written and that crossing between cells was the last step. That step is taken. The whole chain is closed on the PCIe cards — a scheduled single cell, reliable delivery, admission, one clock across cells, coordinated scheduling, and now make-before-break handover.
Three cells now run on the bench at once, on three channels, and a device moves between them on its own measurements: it reports what it hears, the controller picks the strongest neighbour, and the device arrives in its slot in the new cell 99.9 to 100% of the time, with its clock continuous. The part that made it work is the suspend gap — a planned deaf moment in which a device listens to a cell it is not attached to. Without those gaps, two of the six crossings measured nothing at all.
New hardware too: the RTL8822BE, RTL8822CE and RTL8852BE PCIe cards.
Still a bench, and still honest about it: the remaining milestone is a moving device over a real path — fading, several devices, and a walk in the open air. The tracking issue is where it happens.
Your flash dump no longer takes your Wi-Fi password with it
The board catalogue is built from dumps people send in. A dump holds more than a board's identity, so the site now strips Wi-Fi passwords, Gwell P2P keys and cloud credentials out of a report before it is stored, and a dump that would have been published is kept private when it carries its owner's secrets. Photographs are thumbnailed and decoded within a memory budget instead of whatever the phone sent.
Also
Thirty-two repositories saw work this week. Three of them are above — devourer, majestic-webui and the wiki — and here are the rest.
- qemu-bench built the Hi3516CV610 twin: the gen-5 encoder, VI and VPSS online, the ISP statistics in V5's layout so the streamer's exposure and white balance converge, and 29 of the chip's accelerator operations as NPU tasks. White balance now converges in the older twins too, a scene can be placed in front of a camera and measured frame by frame, and a Xiongmai V1 flash image boots.
- microsnander grew up as a flash programmer: 143 more NOR chips and 32 more NAND chips, a chip not in the table found through its SFDP table, NOR over 16 MB, factory bad blocks kept or skipped, a dump saved only when two reads agree, and the CH347 writing about 30% faster.
- majestic also brought Fullhan up to the others — snapshots, live sliders, AE ceilings, an OSD, hue and saturation through the colour matrix, manual white balance — and gave gen-1 HiSilicon parts crop and plugins, T31 rotation, and slow shutter that follows the vendor's rule.
- linux carried Anyka EV200 and EV300 capture, the Fullhan FH8626 ARC coprocessor, the SigmaStar split NOR layout, and PWM pad fixes.
- firmware built the ATBM Wi-Fi drivers from source, gave SigmaStar the split NOR image, added a neo variant for the hi3520dv200, and tuned a long list of sensors against stock cameras.
- u-boot took SigmaStar to a common layer with CI on every die, NOR and NAND, and booted Allwinner V831/V833 on real silicon.
- openhisilicon recovered six hi3516cv6xx sensor drivers and checked them against Sony's datasheets.
- ipctool learnt a read-only GPIO dump of every pin's mux and level, die temperature on three Novatek parts, and the AR0230, IMX662 and Anyka parts.
- builder added seven boards, among them the Tapo C210 v2, an Amcrest S3L and the HeimVision PE3020-W.
- majestic-af gained the VISCA actuator and the head port; motors gained a bit-banged Pelco-D sender for debugging one.
- website also fixed board filters and firmware download pooling; divinus, viewer, decoder, PixelPilot_rk and hevc-wasm took player and overlay fixes; vectis and camex got console polish; waybeam drove an IMX335 and IMX662 on the CV610; openxiongmai tuned SC5332 and SC5235 gain; coupler, defib, openingenic, u-boot-ingenic, atbm-wifi, atbm_60xx, rda-wlan and sbc-groundstations carried board, driver and build work.