AmbiVision36 hardware teardown notes and Hyperion migration progress
I currently have the embedded OV5640 camera working and Hyperion running on the device.
For the LED output side, I’m planning to use a WLED LAN device rather than the original AmbiVision LED controller; Not impossible to use, but the original system appears to use a custom RFCOMM Bluetooth link to an HC-05 Bluetooth module to simulate a wired connection to the LED ribbon so a translation layer to these custom frames will need to be created. If required, Bluetooth support is possible to be enabled on the 5.10.x kernel with tweaking.
There is an AmbiVision application folder located in /home/lufa which is around 1 MB in size + swap. The application appears to be a C-based program using OS event handlers to control the system and small code base. However, it is quite invasive: it modifies system settings, including resetting the root password and overriding WiFi credentials, so replacing it with a cleaner Hyperion-based setup is preferable.
Hardware observations
Obaldius identified that the device appears to be essentially an Orange Pi Zero Plus 2 with an additional custom board responsible for controlling the camera interface.
The extra daughterboard seems to handle signal conditioning/protection for the CSI camera input, likely cleaning up or regulating the overvoltage present on the CSI connector (blows cams). This explains why the OV5640 camera setup differs from a standard Orange Pi configuration.
The base hardware appears to be:
- Orange Pi Zero Plus 2 (H3)
- Custom AmbiVision daughterboard
- OV5640 CSI camera module
- Original AmbiVision controller software
Reference:
Boot and OS notes
It is very straightforward to test alternative operating systems.
The Orange Pi U-Boot bootloader gives priority to the SD card over the onboard eMMC, so a new Armbian image can simply be written to an SD card and inserted for testing.
It would also be worthwhile to make a full backup image of the original eMMC installation before making changes. The AmbiVision36 application contains a unique licence key generated from the CPU serial number. This key is not required for running Hyperion, but preserving the original image may still be useful for archival purposes.
Future possibilities
If there is enough community interest, it should be possible to create a complete polished SD-card ROM image containing:
- Working Orange Pi H3 Linux environment
- OV5640 camera support
- Hyperion installation
- Replacement LED output configuration
- Removal of the original AmbiVision application dependency
For now, I will continue adding notes and discoveries to the repository rather than creating a full image immediately.
The goal is to document the hardware and make it possible to repurpose these devices with open software instead of the original AmbiVision stack.