Hey folks!

We're still hard at work trying to get the OpenMV Cam H7 Plus into production even though the Coronavirus has definitely slowed things down... Anyway, we'd like to share status updates:

OpenMV Cam H7 Plus Status

Assembly for the OpenMV Cam H7 Plus main board finished last week! Here are some pics:

We expect to finish production of the OV5640 sensor board in about 2 weeks which will put us in April to begin shipping... assuming China is operational in April.

Geometric Image Transform Improvements

Continuing on performance improvements this year we've speed up all of our geometric image transform algorithms! linear_polar(), log_polar(), lens_correction(), and rotation_correction() are now 2X or more faster! Additionally, we've cleaned up the image quality outputs on all the algorithms and introduced a new feature to rotation_correction() which lets you do general purpose perspective correction using 4 point correspondences.

4 point correspondence perspective correction allows you to do things like birds-eye-view transforms on images using your OpenMV Cam so you can make better line-following robots and etc. Our code takes care of all the linear algebra required for this - all you need to do is specify 4 points (x/y pairs) in clock-wise order (top left, top right, bottom right, bottom left).

Checkout the video below for more information:

Coronavirus Impact

During the Chinese New Year the Coronavirus hit which resulted in the border between Hong Kong and Shenzhen being closed. This has resulted in OpenMV not being able to ship for 6 weeks now from our Hong Kong warehouse where the majority of our products are stored because the shipping staff live in Shenzhen.

That said, on the bright side, our shipper expects the border between Hong Kong and Shenzhen to re-open within 2 weeks and we might be able to get back to being fully operational soon... hopefully.

Find Circles Performance Improvement

Finally, I'd like to give a shout out to Chris Wagner for helping to pay for improving the speed of find_circles(). We were able to give Larry, our performance optimizer, more work thanks to Chris's help and speed the find_circles() algorithm up by 2X.

If you'd like to see a particular algorithm's performance improved please let us know at openmv@openmv.io.

Hi folks,

Happy New Year! Here's what's going on with OpenMV:

Performance Optimization

We've hired a performance optimization specialist to speed things up on the STM32 architecture. We met Larry Bank at the ARM AI IoT conference in December. In just a few weeks Larry has been able to improve the performance of a few key algorithms on the OpenMV Cam by leaps and bounds:

JPEG Compression (image transfer to the IDE):

• RGB565 VGA was 174ms per frame, now 45ms (3.9x speed-up)
• RGB565 QVGA was 16ms per frame, now 8.4ms (1.9x speed-up)
• RGB565 QQVGA was 4ms per frame, now 2ms (2x speed-up)

He's also managed to speed up AprilTags on the OpenMV Cam H7 Plus (which will be on sale in a few months) by 2x and Line Segment Detection by 4x-6x!!! Checkout the difference in the video below:

We're excited about all the code Larry will be able optimize to make it go faster. We've already got him working on improving QR Code Detection performance, Barcode Detection performance, and Data Matrix Detection performance next (we will also improve color detection performance too). We expect he'll be able to deliver 2x performance or more on these algorithms.

That said, if you are interested in other algorithms on the OpenMV Cam receiving his touch let us know at openmv@openmv.io!

Larry is also generally available for hire as an optimization specialist. Let him know if your company needs something to go way faster. Hiring him is like getting a new processor architecture!

Amazon and Google Shopping

Moving on, we've setup our Amazon Store and Google Shopping Ads. You can now buy all of our stuff directly on Amazon in the USA. Better yet, now that the USA and China have signed a trade deal agreement we will be able to move key products back to the USA for Fulfillment by Amazon. We plan to keep our warehouse in Hong Kong for global shipments but we hope to cut shipping time to customers in the USA dramatically.

Switching shipping providers from ShipBob to fulfillment by our Contract Manufacturer EtonTech (Etonnet) last year while fulfilling our OpenMV Cam H7 Kickstarter was complex and stressful but we finally have a shipping solution that's able to deliver packages internationally reliably. Moving forward, we hope we can continue to grow things without shipping being a massive nightmare.

Interface Library Development

We're starting development on a general purpose interface library for the OpenMV Cam this year. If you've got thoughts about how this should be developed let us know on the forums. As the OpenMV Cam has gotten more popular we've noticed an uptick of requests for connecting it other systems as companion processor.

OpenMV Cam H7 Plus Release Date

Finally, we're on track to start production of the OpenMV Cam H7 Plus after the Chinese New Year! We've got all the components and PCBs ordered and ready for assembly. We hope to finish production and testing by the end of February and start shipping in March.

And... I'd like to say a special thank you to everyone who pre-ordered and OpenMV Cam H7 Plus. This was our first production run without having to launch a Kickstarter to fund it. That said, the preorders really help. Thank you for your support of OpenMV!

Hi everyone,

The OpenMV Cam H7 Plus is now available for pre-order!

The new camera model works just like an OpenMV Cam H7 but without any resolutions limits! Feel free to run color tracking and more on 5 mega-pixel images.

The new system features 32 MB of external SDRAM and 32 MB of external FLASH along with the OV5640 5 Mega Pixel Camera Sensor. We've set everything up such that 16 MB of the flash appears as the uPy drive now for your OpenMV Cam when you plug it into a computer without an SD card. This lets you store TensorFlow models on the camera directly without having to use an SD card. As for the SDRAM, our firmware seamlessly uses that as the frame buffer for all our algorithms. Additionally, our frame buffer allocation code will try to use the internal SRAM on the STM32H743 chip when possible instead of the SDRAM frame buffer for caching data structures thus improving performance when things fit inside internal SRAM.

Anyway, feel-free to pre-order the system now! We expect to deliver the unit in late February or early March. We've already paid for the production run for 1K units and we are just waiting on parts. If you do pre-order the system please avoid buying anything else with your order at the same time so as to not lock our inventory up.

DepthAI

Finally, I just wanted to send out an update that our partner Luxonis is still running their DepthAI Crowd Supply Campaign. If you're interested in running high powered neural networks on a Raspberry Pi combined with a Intel Movidius Myriad X check them out!