We completely overhauled our thermal sensor support in the FIR module.
Bilinear/Bicubic scaling is now supported for upscaling all low-resolution sensors (along with color table support, better alpha blending control, and etc. - all thanks to our new scaling pipeline).
Support for the MLX90641 was added. The OpenMV Cam's firmware now supports the MLX90621, MLX90640, MLX90641, and AMG8833.
And... support for the FLIR Lepton 1, 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5 has been added to the FIR module allowing you connect an external FLIR Lepton sensor to your OpenMV Cam using a Lepton breakout board.
This allows you to do dual thermal and normal vision on any OpenMV Cam (even the old M4!).
We also completely overhauled the TV driver. It now supports the 352x240 SIF NSTC resolution at a 60 Hz update rate. Additionally, it now has all the same scaling features as the updated LCD code - like triple buffering and bicubic/bilinear scaling. This makes the TV driver significantly more useful for wireless display output.
We are also continuing to integrate the new scaling pipeline into more and more functions in the firmware. to_bitmap(), to_grayscale(), to_rgb565(), to_rainbow(), copy(), crop(), scale() were all updated with the new pipeline bringing bicubic/bilinear scaling to these features along with rgb565 channel extraction and color table support.
What's next?
The LCD, FIR, and TV module were all redone to support the launch of the OpenMV Pure Thermal coming later this year. We are just waiting on the second revision of the board to come back for testing before launching the funding campaign for it. A teaser is below:
In the mean-time, we will be adding support for Embedded Display Port out over the Arduino Portenta's USB connector using the STM32H7's MIPI DSI controller next and then finally adding support for triple buffering in the camera sensor driver. Once triple buffering is integrated you will instantly see a massive boot in your algorithm FPS as the processor will no longer ever have to wait for a frame to be received. On the STM32F4 and STM32F7 based OpenMV Cams this will result in a rather high number of interrupts per second in the 50K+ range to handle data... so, it's not going to be advised on older models. However, on the STM32H7, thanks to the MDMA hardware, we will be able to enable triple buffering of the camera data stream with nearly zero CPU load.
