FAQ & Troubleshooting Guide

Preparation stage

1 — Use a computer that supports USB3.0

Before use, confirm that your device supports the USB3.0 protocol; you can check in Device Manager.

Tip

Device ports that support USB3.0 are usually blue or marked "SS" (super speed); you can also use this as a quick check.

2 — Use a cable that supports USB3.0

Do not use ordinary cheap charging cables; before use, confirm that the cable supports the USB3.0 protocol!

With an ordinary charging cable, because it does not support the USB protocol, the computer will not recognize the device after plugging it in.

If the cable supports the USB protocol, you can find our camera device in Device Manager after plugging it in.

Tip

The warning icon appears because the Windows libusb driver is not yet installed. After installation, it will look like the image below:

For hosts that support USB3.0, first make sure the USB compatibility in the VM settings is set to 3.0 or above; otherwise the VM will only recognize the device as USB2.0. (The two differ greatly in speed; using USB2.0 transfer will cause picture stutter and latency due to insufficient bandwidth.)

After connecting the device to the VM, enter the command lsusb in the terminal to check whether the device's Linux Foundation is recognized as USB3.0. If USB3.0 is not enabled, the terminal will show something like:

In VMWare's upper-left corner, choose "Virtual Machine → Settings → USB Controller → USB Compatibility → USB3.x".

After setting it successfully, enter lsusb or lsusb -t again; the device is successfully recognized as USB3.0.

VM image download

For friends who do not know how to set up a VM environment or who cannot pull the SDK files due to network restrictions, we provide a pre-built Ubuntu 22.04 VM image with the SDK environment ready; download it via the link:

After downloading, decompress the Z01 file to get the system image file (because the system image source file is too large to put directly in the cloud drive, it was split into multi-volume archives; decompressing the first file is enough).

After decompression, find the VM under the decompression path in VMWare and import it; you can use it directly.

Info

Username: taiyangshen

Password: abolo123

The SDK files are located at /ShimetaPi

Common issue 1:

Both the computer and the cable support USB3.0, and the preparation above is done, but the device is still recognized as USB2.0.

If the cable you are using is Type-A to Type-C, you may encounter this problem; try reversing the Type-C connector at the device end, trying both insertion directions shown in the figure.

Using a dual Type-C USB cable avoids this problem. The author is not a practitioner in this field; this was just encountered during development. The conjecture is that the Type-C connector is fully symmetric in this case, whereas with a Type-A output, due to its asymmetric structure, some cables may only adapt USB3.0 for one side of the Type-C connector.

General troubleshooting

Picture stutter / frame drops

Symptom: the picture is not smooth and stutters during real-time preview or playback.
Cause: insufficient USB bandwidth (running on USB2.0); improper accumulation-time setting; in embedded scenarios the SD-card write speed cannot keep up with the high frame rate.
Fix: confirm USB3.0 operation (see "Common issue 1" above); adjust the accumulation time (see Fundamentals — accumulation time); for on-board recording, buffer event data in memory first — see RDK X5 — SD card and memory speed.

Event picture all black / all noise

Symptom: no target visible in the preview window, or the screen is full of scattered noise.
Cause: improper bias (sensitivity) — too low misses real events (all black), too high treats background activity as events (all noise); or the accumulation time is too small, making events too sparse.
Fix: adjust the sensitivity per Bias & Tuning; increase the accumulation time appropriately; enable denoising if necessary (see Algo).

Chinese-path errors on Windows

Symptom: the program reports the path does not exist, or the path shows up as ??.
Cause: MultiVision Studio / some tools handle non-ANSI (Chinese, accented characters) paths poorly.
Fix: change the project path, recording path, and output path all to pure English (ANSI) paths.

Recording playback speed abnormal (too fast)

Symptom: a recorded .raw plays back faster than reality.
Cause: recording was done on USB2.0; insufficient bandwidth dropped frames and the recorded event count is low.
Fix: confirm the USB3.0 connection before recording (see "Preparation stage" above); on playback, use variable-speed playback to compare against the real pace.

Multi-camera timestamps not aligned

Symptom: in a multi-camera system, the timestamps of the same physical event differ across cameras; fusion / stereo analysis is misaligned.
Cause: each camera keeps time independently, with no time synchronization.
Fix: use EVS Time Sync for microsecond-level multi-device sync (the first device to connect is the reference; the rest calibrate by offset).