Hi everybody,
Manufacturing Update
MacroFab is now kitting up the 2.5K OpenMV Cams we ordered and we should be able to clear all camera pre-orders by next week! (which we got about 800 of - cameras, not unique shopify orders)... Moving on, as mentioned previously, we've improved the manufacturing process. All OpenMV Cam M7s are now plugged into a PC to test their USB connection is good in addition to passing a self test after being programmed. So, no-one should get any DOA OpenMV Cam M7s! Finally, some folks pointed out that light can leak under your OpenMV Cam M7s lens mount through the backside of the PCB. So, we've installed nice black stickers on the back of each OpenMV Cam M7 now:
The new sticker should hopefully help keep the light out.
New Features
We're getting ready to release OpenMV IDE v1.7.0 with firmware v2.5.0. We've just got to fix a few more bugs and we'll be ready. Anyway, we've added circle detection and rectangle detection to the OpenMV Cam M7's feature set! Circle detection is based on the hough transform while rectangle detection uses the quad detector from the AprilTags library for finding any rectangular object no matter the scale/rotation/shear.
DYI Robocar Racing
I competed in DYI Robocar racing again with the OpenMV Cam and wrote about my experience in the previous blog post about linear regression line following. Check it out to learn how to make a nice line following robot.
Linear Regression Line Following
And for those who don't have time to click the above link here's a video:
New Products
This blog post update isn't done yet! We've got two new products - a servo shield and finally a case!
Servo Shield
The servo shield makes controlling multiple servos from your OpenMV Cam easy. We decided to go ahead and produce this new shield after seeing the need for a way to control multiple servos to make things like the above line following robot easier. It works great for controlling RC cars as you can basically replace the standard RC receiver with the servo shield and an OpenMV Cam and you're good to go. Also, I'd like to give a shout-out to Radomir Dopieralski for coming up with the idea and posting it on hackaday.io.
You an buy the servo shield here.
OpenMV Cam Case
We're almost done prototyping a injection molded plastic case for the OpenMV Cam! We're working with Etonnet to get 5K+ of these little guys built. Once we've got a timeline for delivery we'll start taking pre-orders for them.
The product page is here.
Other news
We'll be ending pre-order pricing on the OpenMV Cam M7 once we've got cameras in stock next week. Pre-order an OpenMV Cam M7 now for the special $55 price. As for our remaining stock of OpenMV Cam M4's, we'll keep selling those until we're out of them. We have about 10 left.
Anyway, that's all folks!
