Seeed Studio Recamera 2002W with Linux Kernel 7.2
Linux 7.2 and a lean Rust application for the Seeed reCamera 2002 (Sophgo SG2002, RISC-V).
A complete system for the reCamera built with Buildroot 2026.05.3: mainline Linux 7.2 with the board’s hardware ported driver by driver, the Sophgo multimedia stack (camera, ISP, scaler, H.264/JPEG encoders, NPU) ported from their Linux 5.10 to 7.2, an A/B layout on the eMMC, and one Rust daemon that does YOLO detection on the NPU and serves the video over WebRTC, RTSP and MJPEG, a web page, MQTT with Home Assistant discovery, an optional LLM/VLM call per detection, and a terminal in the browser.
Why
The reCamera ships with Linux 5.10 and a stack of Seeed services (Node-RED, sscma-node, a supervisor, an overlay filesystem). Seeed’s support stopped there, and their effort moved to a newer camera model. I wanted a current kernel and a smaller, more efficient system I fully understand: one daemon instead of a dozen services, nothing running that the camera does not need, every change reproducible from this tree.
When Seeed sent me the camera to evaluate, I asked them for exactly this — what the port to a current kernel would take — and never found anything better than what ended up here. Much of the hardware behaviour below is documented nowhere else, so the notes are written for whoever tries the same on this board or on another SG200x (Milk-V Duo 256M, LicheeRV Nano). The pitfalls section is the part most worth reading.
PJ 