Open Opal brings my discontinued webcam back

2026-10-12

announcements

Risograph card of a webcam on a monitor with a plant sprouting from its cable

Opal discontinued the C1 webcam and its Composer software, which left a very nice camera sitting on my monitor with nothing to talk to. Alistair Smith fixed that with Open Opal, a native macOS app that drives the camera directly over USB. The C1 is built on Luxonis’ open DepthAI platform, so it turns out you can just do that.

I wanted my camera back, so I jumped in. Eight of my pull requests landed in the first week of October:

Support first-generation C1s with the older Sony IMX378 sensor, which is what mine has. It boots the camera’s software into RAM only, so a power cycle puts it back to stock.
A menu-bar dropdown like Composer’s, which you can tear off into its own window and dock again
“Follow face” autofocus, with near and far limits so it stops hunting between you and the wall behind you
Custom tuning files for the sensor and lens
A virtual camera fix so its frames match the 1080p format it tells video apps to expect
Readable sensor names (“Sony IMX582 (48MP)” instead of “LCM48”)
CI builds and no more searching your Wi-Fi for a camera that only speaks USB

Open Opal docked under the menu bar and torn off as a floating window, with the camera preview hidden

Most of the time I want the menu-bar version. The floating window is great when I’m debugging next to Photo Booth.

To build it yourself you need an Apple silicon Mac on macOS 26 and Xcode 26:

brew install cmake ninja xcodegen
./scripts/bootstrap.sh
./scripts/fetch-models.sh
xcodegen generate

More is coming in my fork: filters, better background mattes, frame rendering and more camera tuning.

Thanks Alistair, for not letting a good camera go to the landfill.