Hi Folks!

OpenMV Cam RT Rev 2

We've finished the design of the second revision of the OpenMV Cam RT1062 Rev 2. We'll be sending it off to sample production this week to our contract manufacturer who will build samples using the full production process before we green light the rest of the production run.

As mentioned previously in the last blog post, we have made the following changes to the design:

1. Battery charging now works on both USB and VIN so an attached battery charges no matter what.
2. We increased the current limit for the whole system so that it can draw up to 1.5A from either USB or VIN.
3. We switched out a few components on the board to reduce the chance of fabrication issues (and/or component reversals).
4. The low power mode regulator has been reduced to 1uA of current draw from 25uA.
5. There's support now to attach an external 3V 210mA or so coin cell battery with wire leads so you can keep your OpenMV Cam's RTC running even without a main external battery. This will give you about 4 months of low-power mode keep-alive if the main external battery is removed. 
6. Status signals for if you are running on battery or USB/VIN are now available to the MCU.
7. There's a user button now on the camera for triggering whatever you like in code.
8. There's also a new power button so you can shutdown the camera and enter low-power mode on demand.
9. We updated the crypto chip onboard to the NXP SE050 which is already supported in Mbed TLS in MicroPython. This means, you'll have working SSL using a unhackable private key on your OpenMV Cam RT out of the box (the security chip doesn't allow you to read the private key out of it - so, it's impossible to clone the system).
10. Both headers are 2x8 now which future proofs the design for more GPIO pins and breaks out a Serial Bootloader recovery pin which lets you unbrick your board without needing a SWD debugger in the event you corrupt the onboard second stage bootloader in flash.
11. And for bug fixes... we improved the bluetooth circuit by adding the RTS/CTS pins and a low-power crystal necessary for the system to work.
12. There were some mosfet level shifters with the wrong gate voltage causing them to leak and ruin our low-power mode current draw numbers. We expect to be sub 50uA on Rev 2.
13. We fixed the LED resistors so they aren't so bright and also added pull-ups to keep the LEDs from turning on accidentally because of pull-downs inside of the processor.
14. Finally, there's just one 16MB flash chipboard now. 4-8MB of that will be reserved for the firmware and 8 MB for user storage. We've verified you can execute in-place from it while also reading/writing to the user storage drive.

You can find the new schematic for Rev 2 of the system here!

Anyway, thanks to all these changes you should have a really good experience with your OpenMV Cam now for turning it into a more mobile system! A real power button means yo can enter/exit low-power mode easily while a user button lets you take pictures on demand without needing anything else. Note that there's also a pin header that exposes the power button signal too so this can be controlled via an external system if you want.

Finally, for the folks who ordered sample units we will be shipping you the Rev2 boards once we have them. Timeline-wise we expect to get Rev2 units back about one month from now in July. We already have all the tests setup to verify the boards so we should be quickly able to get to greenlighting the full production run in the middle of July if things continue to go smoothly.

About the Production Run

We are increasing our production run from 2K units to 2.5K units. Please note that over half the units in the run have been reserved. Once we have parts in stock we already have a few customers who've indicated they will place larger orders. So, if you want an initial unit from the production run please make sure to reserve your unit now.

That said, while we expect to sell out of this production run pretty quick please note that we will be gearing up for another right after this one.

IDE Update News

Bugs have been piling up with OpenMV IDE for the longest. However, we're finally updating it to the latest version of Qt 6.5 on top of QtCreator 10.0.1!

Thanks to the new Qt support all the High-DPI bugs have been resolved. This also includes issues like menus disappearing and other random problems that existed with the Qt 5 libraries. Additionally, Qt 6.5 uses the latest OpenSSL library which should resolve SSL support issues.

Anyway, once the IDE update is complete we should be able to close about half of the outstanding issues with the IDE along with it looking amazing again!

That's all folks! We're just grinding away on things right now. Not else much to talk about.