Finding a pin, a card that lies, and Frigate turned around

What turned up that is worth a look:

• The camera works out for itself what is soldered to which pad. Settings → Pins shows every pad the processor has and which of them are taken. The free ones can be checked one at a time: the camera drives a pad, you watch for what happens. That is how the IR-cut filter, the lamp and the button are found on a board with no diagram. HiSilicon, Goke, SigmaStar, Ingenic. https://github.com/OpenIPC/wiki/blob/master/en/finding-a-gpio.md

• Two cameras on one scene. One sees wide, the other looks closely at a corner of the same scene. Pair them and a dotted rectangle appears on the wide camera's picture: that is what the second one sees. Click it and its live picture goes inside. Zoom in and you are looking at the second camera's detail inside the first one's frame. https://github.com/OpenIPC/wiki/blob/master/en/two-cameras-one-scene.md

• How many viewers a camera will take. A few stalled connections could eat all the memory, after which the camera rebooted every couple of minutes with nothing left in the logs. There is a total ceiling now, and a table by board in the article: on 27 MB it comes to three or four viewers; on 121 MB it is no longer memory that limits you but sixteen connections. https://github.com/OpenIPC/wiki/blob/master/en/majestic-streamer.md#how-many-people-can-watch-at-once

• How to copy stock firmware, every way there is. Take the copy before you write anything to the camera, and take the whole chip. The MAC address, the factory calibration and the original bootloader are only there: without a copy, a camera with a dead bootloader cannot be saved. Six routes in the article, from the simple one on a running camera to a programmer when it shows no sign of life. https://github.com/OpenIPC/wiki/blob/master/en/backup-stock-firmware.md

• A memory card can record nothing and not say so. SD has no self-diagnostics. A broken card confirms the write, returns no error, and then reads back as different data. A counterfeit pretends to be large and, when the real space runs out, writes over the old. The web interface has a card check now; the article says what the result means. https://github.com/OpenIPC/wiki/blob/master/en/sd-card-diagnostics.md

• Why the camera puts out more bitrate than you set. Usually maxQp is to blame: it limits how hard the camera may compress the picture, and when that limit runs out it goes over the bitrate instead. In the measurements only that setting was changed, and the stream went from 758 to 4237 kbit/s against a target of 1024. The camera now notices the overshoot itself and warns about it. https://github.com/OpenIPC/wiki/blob/master/en/majestic-streamer.md#when-the-camera-exceeds-the-bitrate-you-set

• Frigate can be run the other way round: the camera pushes the stream and Frigate only receives it. No connections to the camera are left at all, and the memory it was reserving for them is freed. On weak boards that shows. https://github.com/OpenIPC/wiki/blob/master/en/howto-frigate-integration.md#letting-the-camera-publish-instead-of-being-polled

• The cloud view carries sound, from the 17 September builds. Note: if the microphone is on, the sound goes out by itself with nothing configured. If you do not want it, one line turns it off. https://github.com/OpenIPC/wiki/blob/master/en/howto-self-hosted-cloud-camera.md

• Dehaze, sharpening and noise reduction became settings. The defaults are the same as before, so the picture on an untouched camera does not change. The article has measurements, and one result is unexpected: turning sharpening off made the picture worse on one camera. https://github.com/OpenIPC/wiki/blob/master/en/majestic-streamer.md#dehaze-sharpening-and-noise-reduction

• Number plate recognition right in the browser. The camera hands over a frame and your browser reads it. The most useful part is that it explains why a plate could not be read. https://github.com/OpenIPC/wiki/blob/master/en/raw-editor.md#plates

• The night lamp washes out exactly what you wanted to see. A lamp close to a face or a plate takes them to white, and the camera does not notice: it holds the average brightness of the frame, and the average is fine. Two new settings watch the brightest parts and hold the lamp back. https://github.com/OpenIPC/wiki/blob/master/en/majestic-streamer.md#when-the-lamp-burns-out-what-you-were-trying-to-see

• How to tell a camera what it is made of. Two ways. Settings on the camera itself work at once but are lost on a factory reset. A device profile in the firmware builder is applied on first boot to every camera of that model and survives one. https://github.com/OpenIPC/wiki/blob/master/en/per-device-settings.md