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.
