Hey Folks!

It's been a month since our last update. Time for the new one!

We're back to Normal Operation

Behind the scenes, you may have not known this, but, we had a huge backlog of orders to clear out that had been sitting for... years. Anyway, we've finally shipped everything now and are back to normal operation with orders waiting less than a week to ship. So, the effects of the chip shortage on us have finally passed!

Now, if you want to buy anything you can expect it to ship quickly. As for distribution, we are working on pushing stock out through all our channels now and hope to have more progress on that as the year goes on.

Store Updates

Also, you may not have noticed, but, the new store is less glitchy too now. We've got a team actively working on improving things and hope to roll out some more updates to the store soon to make it easier to navigate and quickly find any information you need.

To this point, we have also been porting all our old Eagle designs to Altium. As of last week almost all of our of shields, base boards, and camera sensor modules have been ported. Once we finish the porting process we'll start to link the Altium designs in the store and add 3D model support like we did for the RT1062.

Firmware v4.5.3 Released!

Finally, we spent the last two months mainly focusing on delivering on the RT1062 Product and making sure it's performance was competitive with the H7 Plus. This is now the case! We finished the camera sensor driver for it which unlocks JPEG streaming support from the OV5640 along with adding DMA offloading. The DMA offloading in particular unlocks a massive 47% performance boost for all algorithms. We additionally, have another across-the-board 7% performance boost coming soon too.

You can find the list of changes here for firmware v4.5.3. We probably worked a little too long on the firmware before releasing it. But, anyways, it's now finally official! Also, we finally have machine module examples for board control on the RT1062!

Other notable features:

• We enabled more TensorFlow operators on all cameras and finally fixed the bug that causes the system to crash on loading an unsupported model. Thanks Ibrahim!
• And for the RT1062 we enabled all possible supported operators.
• All line ops have been optimized using Cortex-M SIMD. This unlocks 15% speedups across the board for binary and math operations.
• We also have Cortex-M SIMD optimizations coming for erode/dilate soon which provide a 30% speedup for RGB565 and 150%!!! speed ups for Grayscale Images. The same technique used for making erode/dilate faster can be used to improve mean() and friends too for future firmware releases.

Anyway, please see the release notes above for all the changes. There are a lot. The focus for this month will be IDE work next. So, things will slow down on the firmware side of things. But, I'll be back to pushing performance improvements in April.

That's all folks!