Hi everyone,
We've got a lot of news today! But, first, checkout the the upcoming OpenMV Cam H7!
The OpenMV Cam H7 is powered by ST Microelectronics new STM32H7 microcontroller which features a 400 MHz ARM Cortex M7 CPU capable of executing 2 instructions per clock. The STM32H7 achieves a coremark score of 2020 which is comparable to the 2060 coremark score of the 1 GHz Raspberry Pi 0 for general purpose instruction execution performance (the ARM Cortex M7 core is a lot more efficient than the ARM11 core the Raspberry Pi Zero uses). Additionally, the OpenMV Cam H7 now features removable camera modules which allow you to use the OpenMV Cam with Global Shutter and FLIR Lepton sensors for serious computer vision applications.
Here's a short list of the product enhancements:
- 2x Better Performance than the OpenMV Cam M7
- High quality JPEG image compression without much overhead thanks to JPEG encoder hardware on chip.
- Much lower power consumption (40 nm tech versus 90 nm tech for the OpenMV Cam M7) - approximately ~80 mA less.
- An on board switching power supply capable of supplying 1A.
- A new LiPo Battery Connector for JST compatible LiPo batteries.
- Removable Camera Modules!
- A FLIR Lepton 1/2/3 Carrier Board for plug and play thermal computer vision.
- An MT9V034 RGB Global Shutter for blur free computer vision capable of running at up to 240 FPS @ QQVGA.
We're almost done with the development of the OpenMV Cam H7, everything is working great so far with the OV7725 camera (which comes with the OpenMV Cam H7 by default). We've only got the FLIR Lepton board and the MT9V034 board left to complete before we're ready to KickStart the new product. If you'd like to help us out, please spread the word and help get more people on our email list and following us on Twitter/YouTube.
OpenMV IDE v1.9.0 Released
The key new feature of OpenMV IDE v1.9.0 is mult-language support. The IDE has now been translated into Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese!
Other than the new-multi language support features... we fixed bugs related to the OpenMV Cam working on Macs, the video recorder not working on some linux machines, and various other things.
OpenMV Cam Firmware v2.9.0 Released
With the latest OpenMV Cam firmware, we massively improved a lot of the basic image manipulation methods, drawing features, filtering, and argument parsing. Tons of things were improved in the image module.
In particular:
- Drawing methods all now have everything you'd ever want and need. Thickness options, filling, text scaling and kerning support, etc.
- New methods for drawing arrows, flood filling, drawing images, etc.
- Much improved binary image manipulation (support for masks, etc).
- All the standard image math ops (add, mul, div, min, max, etc).
- Adaptive Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization Support
- It's fast and massively improves image quality for folks using the OpenMV Cam outside in dynamically lit environments.
- Better image filtering options (adaptive thresholding on everything, more obvious sharpening support, bilateral image filtering, cartoon image filtering, etc.).
- And finally, a fun CIFAR-10 CNN Built-In!
ARM recently released a new Convolution Neural Network Library for Cortex M4/M7 microcontrollers that lets them run small networks trained on your desktop/laptop or the cloud on your OpenMV Cam. The built-in CIFAR-10 CNN shows off this kind of functionality. That said, coming soon in our next firmware release we'll have support for running ANY CNN (that's small enough) on your OpenMV Cam using a conversion script that will convert a network trained using Caffe to a binary blob your OpenMV Cam can load and run. And... thanks to the deep learning revolution there's tons of data sets out there for all kinds of things.
So, we'll try to distribute OpenMV IDE in the future with pre-converted CNNs for all sorts of things you'd like to detect with your OpenMV Cam. We're serious about supporting this new functionality for the OpenMV Cam M7 and the OpenMV Cam H7. With smaller networks looking for only one class or not you should be able to easily hit 30+ FPS CNN performance on the OpenMV Cam H7 for detecting things like people entering and exiting doorways (a very common request).
Anyway, enjoy OpenMV IDE v1.9.0 and Firmware v2.9.0!
