Hi everyone,

Here's what's new for OpenMV:

OpenMV IDE v2.2.0 Released

The next version of OpenMV IDE with firmware v3.3.1 has been released and is available for download. The new IDE features some minor quality of life improvements requested by customers along with a few bug fixes. Firmware v3.3.1 on the other hand brings in a lot of new features!

Firmware V3.3.1

The latest firmware release for your OpenMV Cam adds the following features:

• More OpenMV Cam M4 features! We removed the YUV lookup table in the firmware for jpeg streaming. While this reduces jpeg performance it frees 192KB of flash up allowing us to bring the M4 back up to some type of feature parity as the OpenMV Cam M7/H7.
• Fast Gamma/contrast/brightness correction. Yes, it's been missing for a while in the firmware. It's been added now. The adjustment method operates extremely fast on the image without any frame rate hit.
• Image rotation by 90/180/270 and transpose. This is different from rotating the image pixels, this rotates the shape of the image (w/h change).
• String drawing now supports rotating and mirroring/flipping characters and strings along with floating point scaling.
• Image drawing is better with floating point scaling and alpha-blending.
• Jpeg image quality for streaming has now been improved. No more MCU artifacts on non-multiple of 8x8 images.
• TV broadcast module support added to the firmware.
• CPU Frequency module updated to allow slowing the main processor down to save power.
• Copy, Scale, and Crop support.
• Ability to create new images more easily and copy images around and re-use data buffers.
• Extract single color panes from RGB565 images.
• Working exFat support.
• Full Lepton 1/2/3 support with the ability now to set the lepton into temperature measurement mode such that the image pixels directly map to a temperature. Examples included in the IDE.
• Full MT9V034 support for 752x480 triggered global shutter images.
• General bug fixes.

STM32H7 Clock Freq Bump

ST has updated their documentation to saying that the STM32H743VIT6 chip can be run safely at 480 MHz. This improvement in clock speed increases the OpenMV Cam H7 coremark performance to 2400 making it slightly faster than a RaspberryPi 2 Cortex-A7 core with a coremark score of 2340.

Anyway, we'll be doing another firmware release soon with this improvement.

TensorFlow for Microcontrollers Support

Google released TensorFlow for Microcontrollers recently and we are currently porting it to the OpenMV Cam. With this new feature you'll be able to run networks trained using TensorFlow using more supported and easier to install tools. The initial release of TensorFlow for Microcontrollers supports depth-wise convolutions and fully-connected layers so we should be able to port Mobilenet to the OpenMV Cam. That said, the initial release be somewhat slow as Google has not yet implemented convolutions using ARM-CMSIS-NN for the best possible speed on Cortex-M7 CPUs. We made a new github repo for this work here: https://github.com/openmv/tensorflow-lib. The lib will be available for anyone to run on a cortex-m4/m7 core.

Moving forwards, after getting the firmware release out we will be working on integrating TensorFlow docker images into OpenMV IDE along with training scripts such that we can automate the process of transfer learning using MobileNet for everyone so you'll be able to train networks trivially using OpenMV IDE.

TV and Wireless TV Shield

The new TV Shield:

And Wireless TV Shield:

Are available for pre-order now. These two shields were designed by SingTown our Chinese Affiliate. The TV shield and the wireless TV shield give your OpenMV Cams the ability to display the frame buffer on a TV. In particular, the Wireless TV Shield is quite useful for displaying images from your OpenMV Cam on FPV screens.

The initial driver supports 160x120 RGB565 and GRAYSCALE images. However, we should be able to increase the resolution support to 320x240 with some more firmware work. TensorFlow support will take priority for right now.

Kickstarter Shipping

We're in the process of shipping most of our Kickstarter orders right now. We hope to finish this in 2/3-weeks. We're about half-way done shipping over 1K orders.

Store Backlog

Until we finish shipping all Kickstarter orders the store will sit in pre-order mode. We have everything in stock right now but we cannot give you a good time-line on when your order will ship. We had previously opened the store up on April 1st and got a flood of orders followed by people asking when their order will be shipped. We have since then completed those orders and shut the store back down again until we ship all Kickstarter orders as opening the store up at the same time caused a nightmare for us.

More Manufacturing

Finally, we've asked EtonTech to buy long lead-time parts for the next batch of 2.5K OpenMV Cam H7s. We already have 2.5K STM32H743VIT6 chips in stock so we just need to get the cameras and a few other parts. While it's a nice problem to have - we're going to try to avoid running out of stock for a while.

Hi folks,

You can now buy the OpenMV Cam H7, global shutter sensor, FLIR Lepton adapter, and OpenMV Cam H7 case online from our store! That said, we're in the middle of an inventory transfer moving all our accessories from the USA to Hong Kong. So, anything other than the above 4 parts is going to have to be pre-ordered. The inventory transfer was supposed to be completed 2 weeks ago but there were shipping delays...

Anyway, as for the shipping queue depth, we're fulfilling our Kickstarter orders daily along with store orders now. Since many orders are blocked from being fulfilled until the inventory transfer is complete we can more quickly fulfill just the OpenMV Cam H7 and the above 3 accessory orders. That said, expect shipping to you to take a while even if you order now. We expect to be backed up all through April. Kickstarter orders will get priority.

Firmware Update

The latest OpenMV Cam M7/H7 firmware was released a few weeks ago and the online documentation has now been updated. We will have the IDE release out soon which packages everything up nicely. The latest firmware fixes in particular above QVGA resolution support for the MT9V034 camera sensor and enables target temperature measurement mode for the FLIR Lepton 3.5 along with a slew of other things.

Thanks for reading,

Hi folks, Merry Christmas!

OpenMV IDE 2.1.0 and Firmware 3.2.0 are now available! Nothing much important has changed in OpenMV IDE (just bug fixes), however, one of our users Dr. Chris Rogers wrote a LabVIEW Plugin for the OpenMV Cam. This new plugin is now distributed with OpenMV IDE under the:

<install_dir>/share/qtcreator/labview

folder. Here are some screen shots!

Thank you Chris!

As for the firmware we fixed ALOT of various bugs encountered on the forums for Firmware 3.2.0 and we added MLX90640 and AMG8833 thermal vision sensor support to all OpenMV Cam modules. We already blogged about the thermal vision feature before but now it's actually available! So, if you have an OpenMV Cam M7 and want to start playing around with thermal images and color images combined you can now! We've got quite a few examples per sensor type making it a snap to get started now.

Moving on, we'd like to apologize for sitting on the firmware release for so long. Running the store and the Kickstarter have been taking up all the development time. OpenMV has gotten popular enough now with over 10K units sold that answering forum questions and dealing with customer service is now quite a bit of work. That said, we'd managed to keep on top of all the important stuff like the OpenMV Cam H7 Kickstarter!

OpenMV Cam H7 Kickstarter

Everything has been going smoothly for the OpenMV Cam H7 Kickstarter! We've gotten production samples back and have tested them all and they appear to be working without issues. If you are interested in a production sample let me know. I have about 20 at my house right now available for sale if you want one now. Note that I will be charging for the production samples and shipping via FedEx if you want one.

EtonTech, our contract manufacturer, tells us that the STM32H743VIT6 chips arrive in January and that we'll start production on-time allowing us to begin delivery by about the Chinese New Year (hopefully before things shutdown in China for the holidays).

New Shields

Next, we got some new shields for the OpenMV Cam coming soon:

Pan and Tilt Shield

We just got samples back for a new Pan and Tilt Shield that will be available soon on the webstore.

This new shield breaks out the three servo pins (P7/P8/P9), provides a terminal block connector for powering the OpenMV Cam and servos from an un-regulated battery, and provides another battery servo connector power powering the OpenMV Cam and servos from an ESC.

Wireless Video Shield

Our friends at SingTown recently developed a wireless video transfer shield for the OpenMV Cam:

The new wireless video shield attaches to the OpenMV Cam via the SPI bus where the OpenMV Cam then sends image data to a SPI to NTSC video generator chip. The video generator chip is then connected to a 5 GHz wireless transmitter chip that broadcasts the video on the same frequencies used by drone FPV receivers.

We'll be getting these in stock once they are available. With the OpenMV Cam M7/H7 and the wireless video shield you'll be able to add thermal video to your drone! Note that the transmitter draws a lot of power however.

Can Shield

We haven't actually started developing a CAN shield yet. However, we've gotten a lot of requests from folks for CAN support. In particular, for FIRST robotics support. So, we're going to get a CAN interface shield done ASAP for folks to use the OpenMV Cam in CAN networking based applications.

Moving to Amazon FBA

Last but not least. You may have noticed the new UPC barcodes on our products now. We've been adding these so that we can move our products to Amazon FBA for better and faster shipping to everyone. I'll be setting up the Amazon FBA system over the holidays and hope to have all our inventory fully moved over before the OpenMV Cam H7 ships in March.

Anyway, That's all folks! (Kwabena and Massimo Banzi of Arduino below)

Happy New Year!