• OAK-FFC 4P PoE not responding

Just purchased an OAK-FFC 4p PoE board and the demo software doesn't recognize it. Using the same hardware setup, an OAK-D POE camera is recognized by the demo and custom scripts acquire images.

The unrecognized OAK-FFC 4p PoE camera has an odd pulsing blink pattern all, 5V(red), PG and RST (orange), turn on with a rapid blink and 1s off. LED 2 1 and 0 0 (all green) also turn on with the others but have a counting pattern. Its been a few months, but I seem to recall the other OAK-FFC 4p PoE we purchased remaining on steady (unfortunately it is unavailable for comparison testing). Sort of looked like the boot switches were reworked. Any troubleshooting suggestions?

    Hi bob
    How are you connecting the device to your host machine? What POE switch/injector are you using? Are you getting the "NO DEPTHAI DEVICE FOUND" error?

    Thanks,
    Jaka

      Yes, there is a depthAI device found error. I am using a tplink TL-SG1005P. I get the same behaviour when I have no cameras, 1, 2, or 3 cameras connected. The cable is connected to the PoE in; when swapping only the ethernet connector attached OAK-FFC 4p PoE, with the OAK-D PoE, everything works.

        Hi bob
        Few things to check:

        • your depthai version (best to keep it on latest)
        • bootloader version of the device (same principle)
        • ip assigned to your device (or fallback ip)

        Since you can't connect to the device as per usual, you will have to connect through USB. Hold the button next to the usb connector and connect the device to a host. Then release the button and the device should boot up for USB connections.

        Links:
        https://docs.luxonis.com/projects/api/en/latest/components/bootloader/
        https://docs.luxonis.com/projects/hardware/en/latest/pages/guides/getting-started-with-poe/#dhcp-and-static-ip

        Thanks,
        Jaka

          The manual install directions may be missing a few packages for pillow and pysimplegui which are required to run devicemanager or I missed a step.

          I pressed switch B2 while connecting the unpowered device to USB. After connection, the device did not enumerate and there were no lights or power indication and devicemanager only found a remotely connected OAK-D PoE; it could not detect the USB device. The device is connected to a working super speed port on laptop computer via a high quality USB A to C cable and I measured a solid 5.1V across C73 on the board.

            Hi bob
            Let me check, ill get back to you.

            Thanks,
            Jaka

              any other ideas or time to exchange?

              • erik replied to this.

                Hi bob ,
                We apologize for the delay. I believe the camera needs to be connected to the POE for the power as well as via USB (for communication). Could you try that?
                Thanks, Erik

                  I set boot switches 2,4,5 to on, held switch B2, plugged in USB, plugged in PoE, released reset, and waited 1min, nothing enumerated in windows device manager and device_manager.py. I set the switches to 5,6 on and repeated, nothing. I set the switch back to 2,4,5 and repeated without holding S2, nothing. I then unplugged the FFC 4p PoE and plugged the cable into the OAK-D and it was found by device_manager.py and verified my phone enumerates on the USB cable.

                  and the camera likely does need to be connected to PoE, when connected the SOM heatsink warms up, but when connected only to USB there is no change

                  • erik replied to this.

                    Hi bob ,
                    Could you measure the resistance of the boot switch (whether ON and OFF are actually correct on pins 2,4,5,6)? If you have done this a couple of times it might be that the switch got defective, I have heard that happening one time before.

                      While it looks like the switch has been reworked, the switch works (GPIO58 is always high). What does not work is the power; the 1.8V is pulsing on and off with the LEDs - 40ms on and then it falls and retrys ~18ms later, repeats 14x and then waits 1.7s and repeats. I really need working hardware now.

                      2 months later

                      Sorry to open this up. I'm working with the OAK-FFC-4P-POE with three cams attached right now. Is there any solution to this?

                      After trying the troubleshooting listed, I exchanged it.

                      Thanks for the prompt reply!
                      That makes sense. I'm considering the same.

                      But generally thinking: Is the PoE board worth it? Do you get to real-time on a normal 1Gbps network card with multiple (say 2-3) cams at all? Considering going back to USB although it's a bit annoying with range and "ruggedness".

                      It depends on frame rate and settings. Preliminary testing suggested about 7 - 30% CPU utilization for care and feeding of the phy which also changes with data throughput. Unfortunately, that same core is also used for auto focus/exposure/white balance so there might be a a larger performance hit than one might expect if you are hoping to maximize frame rate. It isn't hard to keep network delays reasonable if you control the network and carefully optimize the host OS.

                      Ok, makes sense. If I'm looking to get 20 FPS with 3 cams at FullHD, I'll have to do compression if I'm not mistaken. Do you think h264 compression would still work without too much quality degradation? My host is a strong i9 13th 13900k running Windows (not my choice..).

                      I don't think it will process that many pixels; there are a number of hardware blocks in the chain and each has limits - they are listed in the documentation somewhere. I remember something like 248million/s for the encoder but you would have to check.

                      I am currently stuck at 10FPS on smaller cameras than you are planning; the limit is because the auto focus/exposure/white balance algorithm which you can set to run on every nth frame seems to have a bug (it defaults to every frame) which pegs the ethernet tending core at 100% (dropping most frames) or causes it to crash. Luxonis runs my code and gets a different result than I get and I haven't figured out why or had time to poke at it much since I dropped the other thread.

                      You won't get realtime performance from windows ever unless "real time" loop closure is in the 10s of seconds or your application doesn't have to reliably close the loop every interval.

                      All right, that makes sense, thanks.

                      It's seems there is no way around the USB board then in the case of 3 cams at FullHD at ~30FPS. Thanks!

                      10 months later

                      Hi,

                      My issue with is with trying to flash on to my OAK-FFC 4P PoE device so I could peform some detection in standalone form. I am using the .dap file approach. I tried following the script according to the documentation on creating a .dap file, but I run into these errors when I run the script:

                      bootloader = dai.DeviceBootloader(bl)

         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

RuntimeError: Failed to connect to device, error message: X_LINK_DEVICE_NOT_FOUND

                      I believe this error means my device cannot be found, however when I run device manager, I can locate the device and view it's status just fine.

                      Thanks in advance for your help!