Neuro Studio Getting Started
Installing Neuro Studio, connecting a Neuro N6, and using the live view, snapshots, recording and the side panels.
Neuro Studio is Ohm Lab's desktop application for the Neuro N6. It shows the board's live camera picture with the results of whatever the sketch is doing drawn on top, plays the microphone, graphs the sensors, and provides a serial terminal, all over one USB cable. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.
Installation
Installers for Windows, macOS and Linux are to be published on ohmlab.co.uk.
| System | Notes |
|---|---|
| Windows | No driver step. Windows recognises the board automatically |
| macOS | libusb is installed first: brew install libusb |
| Linux | libusb-1.0 is installed from the package manager. Unprivileged USB access may need a udev rule |
Connecting
The board is connected over USB-C and Neuro Studio finds it automatically. The status bar at the bottom of the window shows "Connected: Neuro N6" once the stream is running. No port selection is required.
The board must be running a sketch that produces video for a picture to appear. A sketch with no camera, such as a sensor-only sketch, still connects and shows its terminal output and sensor panels.
The main view
The centre of the window is the live camera picture. Any results the sketch publishes appear on it: boxes with labels for an object detector, coloured masks for segmentation, skeletons for pose estimation, hand landmarks, or the boxes and text of a QR code reader. The frame rate and inference time are shown in the corner.
Four buttons sit over the picture:
| Button | Function |
|---|---|
| Snapshot | Saves the current frame as a JPEG file |
| Record | Starts and stops recording the stream to a file |
| Fill viewport | Switches between fitting the picture inside the window and filling it |
| Fullscreen | Shows the picture full screen |
The status bar
| Control | Function |
|---|---|
| Transport | Chooses USB, WiFi access point or WiFi station, and picks a board when several are connected |
| Microphone | Plays the board's microphone through the computer's speakers when a sketch streams it |
| Bootloader | Opens the firmware flashing tool. See Bootloader Tool |
| New window | Opens a second Neuro Studio window for a second board |
| Theme | Light or dark |
Side panels
The sidebar holds panels that appear when the sketch produces the matching data. A panel for something the sketch is not sending shows a "No data" message.
| Panel | Shows | Produced by |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal | The board's serial console, including what it printed before the app connected | Serial.print and the core |
| IMU | Acceleration and rotation, as numbers and graphs | The LSM6DSL library's sendNS() |
| Magnetometer | Magnetic field, as numbers and graphs | The MMC5603NJ library's sendNS() |
| ToF | A heat map of the distance sensor's zones, with settings | The VL53L1CB library's sendNS() |
| Thermal | The thermal camera picture with a choice of colour maps. Tapping the picture places a temperature probe | The NeuroVisionThermal library |
| Camera Controls | Exposure, gain and white balance switches and sliders | Any OV5640 sketch |
| ISP | White balance, black level, sharpness and gamma for the global shutter sensor | A VD66GY sketch with manual ISP tuning enabled |
| Tuning | A slider for each value the sketch registered for live adjustment, with a Copy as code button | n6_tune_int and related calls |
| Vision | The decoded text and a thumbnail for each QR code, barcode, colour blob or AprilTag found | The classical vision examples |
| Audio | The sound classifier's scores and the spectrogram it saw | The N6AudioAI library |
| Events | A list of events the board recorded, with time and cause | The N6Events library |
Panels describes each in more detail.
Connecting over WiFi
A sketch that streams over WiFi serves the same stream on TCP port 5000. The transport is chosen from the status bar.
| Transport | Where Neuro Studio connects |
|---|---|
| WiFi access point | The computer joins the board's network. The board is at 192.168.10.1 |
| WiFi station | The board joins the user's network. Its address is learnt over USB the first time it is plugged in, and Neuro Studio fills it in |
The USB serial terminal continues to work while video travels over a network.
Uploading while connected
Sketches can be uploaded from the Arduino IDE while Neuro Studio is connected. The picture pauses during the upload and returns when the new sketch starts.
Common problems
| Symptom | Cause | Remedy |
|---|---|---|
| Not connected | Cable carries power only, or the board is in the bootloader | Use a data cable. If the RGB LED pulses red, the board is in the bootloader; upload a sketch or press reset |
| Connected but no picture | The sketch has no camera or streams to the display | Upload a camera sketch, or check cfg.transport |
| Picture but no boxes | The sketch runs no model, or the confidence threshold is high | See First Model |
| Terminal empty | Tools > Debug console is Off and the sketch prints nothing | Expected. The sketch's own Serial.print output appears here |
| A panel is missing | The sketch does not send that data | Panels appear only when their data arrives |
Related pages
Panels, Bootloader Tool, and for developers Wire Protocol, Publishing Data from a Sketch and Building from Source.