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.