M5Camera Glitches and poor documentation



  • Today I got the M5Camera, and after struggling with all of the confusing documentation, I got it working over a WLAN connection. The picture was clear, and I was about to breathe out after struggling with the documentation when my wife pointed out that the picture was mirrored, that is, flipped on the vertical axis. WTF!

    The M55Stack "official" docs told me that I needed to install firmware, but that the only way was to use a Windows only program. Eh? In the days when the Raspberry Pi (Raspbian Linux) is selling more units than they can produce, why are you, a young startup in China, so Windows (and Mac)-centric.

    M5Stack have an amazingly good concept, this advantage can be easily lost by having no real concept for proper documentation. As a platform to help people learn coding, M5Stack has many plus points (my opinion) over the Raspberry Pi, but they have recognized up front the need for good documentation, and have built a very impressive system.

    An example from my experience in the last few days trying to get M5Stack products working:-

    You are advising Linux users to install an outdated driver for the serial port communication. My Ubuntu 19.4 already has this built in to the kernel (in v5+ file cp210x.ko). Your linked download is for a file tested on kernel version 3 for linux, and according to the readme maybe can be built and used for kernel 4, but for kernel 5 there"s no information.

    I am in Berlin, Germany, and your products are just arriving in the shops under the Maker Factory label from the electronics firm Conrad, where I bought mine. Here the M5Stack products here are relatively expensive. The documentation on the Maker Factory website is a bit out of date, but I found a video by Luke explaining how to flash the M5Camera firmware. I have your M5Burner on linux Ubuntu - and this worked fine.

    Great, but now there's a lot of stray white pixels on the images, which should not be there. The images are now upside down, which has the cables coming out of the top of the unit when I reverse the mounting.

    Where do I go from here?

    Kind regards from Berlin