Kickstarter Shipping Done!
over 4 years ago – Mon, Jul 29, 2019 at 12:50:53 AM

Hi folks,

Sorry for not sending out any emails in the last couple of months. It's been a very busy season for me and Ibrahim lately. I apologize for not sending out more emails about what we were up to.

Anyway, here's the news:

Kickstarter Shipping is Done!

Yes, we completed all Kickstarter shipping back at the end of May/June. If you have not received your goods yet it's because you either:

Never completed the survey (34 backers) - we've tried to get you to complete the survey many times. Note that all backers are always entitled to their shipment no matter how long they take to fill out the survey.

Lock order failure (1 backer) - You gave us invalid information on the survey and BackerKit won't lock the order down.

Finally, if you are not on this list it just means your goods got stuck in customs or there was a shipping failure. We've been getting emails from folks about not receiving their tracking number even when the order shipped meaning you gave us the wrong email address.

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Moving on, we've fulfilled 877 orders out of 912 orders on BackerKit. So, shipping is basically done. We will continue to respond to help support emails and deal with shipping issues.

New Products

Now that me and Ibrahim are exiting a season where life got quite busy we are working on some new stuff:

SingTown has produced a OV2640 camera module for the H7 that can take 1600x1200 jpeg images. We're working on the software driver support for this module still. But, once complete we'll release the design files for it if you want to build it yourself and take pics. The OV2640 picture quality is kinda bad however and we most likely will not build anymore units beyond test units to get the software working.

SingTown has also produced a OV5640 camera module for the H7 that can take 2592x1944 (5MP) images and jpeg compress them before sending them to the H7. The OV5640 has excellent picture quality and once attached to your H7 you will be able to take high res jpeg pics with it along with color/grayscale image processing.

And finally... SingTown has produced a version of the OpenMV Cam H7 with SDRAM. We are working on the driver bringup for this new board and once completed we will offer it for sale before the end of the year. The new SDRAM OpenMV Cam H7 will allow you to process images using any algorithm at the maximum camera resolution. In particular, for folks wanting to do barcode, qrcode, data matrix, and apriltag processing this new system will free you from resolution limits.

TensorFlow Lite Support Coming Soon

We will be releasing TensorFlow lite support for flat buffer tflite files in the next firmware release. We finished porting TensorFlow to the OpenMV Cam H7 back in April but there hasn't been time on our end to produce a suitable demo for it yet. However, in the last couple of months Google released new smaller nets that are able to run on our system for things like Visual Wake Words which allows your OpenMV Cam to do presence detection on a scene.

Additionally, for the OpenMV Cam H7 with SDRAM you will be able to run mobilenet directly on it.

Final Notes

The OpenMV H7 Kickstarter is officially complete more or less. Please email us directly for any issues you need resolved. We will not be posting anymore updates on this campaign.

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And... as a general note, if you are interested in becoming more involved with OpenMV we are looking for folks to work with! The email load for help support and dealing with shipping issues, having a life, and working a day job doesn't leave much time for new feature development. If you are interested in helping with the project please let us know.

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For future updates please see our official blog. We will move all updates there again. The next firmware release with all the above features is likely two months away given all the work that is required to get done to release it.

Shipping Status June
almost 5 years ago – Mon, Jun 03, 2019 at 02:32:16 AM

Hi folks,

Here's the current shipping status:

About 36 folks haven't responded to the survey, 2 folks cards can't be charged, 1 persons address is invalid, and we have about 32 folks left to ship. Finally, 842 orders have been successfully shipped.

For the 32 folks waiting for their order to ship still, we ran out of LCD/WiFi shields due to an inventory over count when moving goods from the USA to HK. So, we ran another production run of both LCD/WiFi shields. The WiFi shield production run went smoothly but the LCD shield one did not.

The panel we use for the LCD shield is EoL and the manufacturer has reved the design and gave us a new panel which did not work with our drivers. So, we've managed to get them to build the old panel to cover stock until we have drivers for their new display. We have not received the old panels yet so we are still blocked on shipping orders that need an LCD shield.

Anyway, we are almost done with the Kickstarter! Running the store and the Kickstarter at the same time though has definitely been taking time away from development work. Once we get past the Kickstarter we'll have new feature updates.

More Shipping News
almost 5 years ago – Mon, May 06, 2019 at 08:35:22 PM

Hi Folks,

We've shipped out the majority of all the orders now. If you are a FLIR Backer GroupGets has received your orders this week and should be shipping out goods to you this week or the next. If you are in the USA you should get your order quickly. If you are outside of the USA it may take more time. Sorry for all the shipping taking so long.

After we process tracking numbers for the FLIR Backers, we have about 40 of you who didn't respond to emails for shipping information so you will not be shipped your order. Additionally, we have another 40 orders that we ran out of LCD/WiFi shields for and have to delay shipping until we have these back in stock. We have already placed the production order for more of these shields and hope to get them soon. When we were doing the inventory transfer from ShipBob (our previous shipper) we received less shields than we thought were in our inventory leaving us unprepared for an inventory shortfall (yes - our inventory was over-counted).

Anyway, our new shipper is now working on store back-orders again. I've re-opened the store by putting our actual inventory counts back on it. We have full stock for most items are are producing anything out of stock. I'll be sinking the funds we have right now into keeping production up to keep the store open. For example, we have about 700 OpenMV Cam H7s in stock so we have to start another manufacturing order.

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In other news, we had our first bite of the China to USA Tariffs, when shipping the FLIR Backer orders to the USA we had to pay about $4K on entry duties, this was more than double what we collected for shipping. While we've been able to absorb the cost it does mean that moving inventory to the USA is going to be tricky. So, we will work on just getting shipping from HongKong running smoothly and keeping stocks up.

Finally, regarding DHL Express shipping, some of the orders shipped out where customers paid for DHL Express shipping were not shipped via DHL Express. If this has happened to you we will refund the $15 via PayPal if you want it back. That said, we could use it to pay for the above entry duties and other hidden costs we've had to deal with fulfilling the Kickstarter.

Backer Orders Sent to GroupGets
almost 5 years ago – Fri, Apr 26, 2019 at 11:50:42 PM

Hi folks,

All the FLIR Backer Orders have been sent to GroupGets. Once GroupGets receives the orders and ships them out we'll be able to upload the tracking numbers for these to BackerKit. Hopefully GroupGets receives the order next week or so to ship out.

We're sorry for how long shipping is taking.

Anyway, we have about 300 more orders to ship so we expect to finish all other orders over the next two weeks or so. There's a May Day holiday coming up which will slow this down. But, signs look good for getting all orders shipped by mid-May. I'll re-open the store at that point.

Also, we've noticed that DHL shipping out of HongKong isn't necessarily the fastest right now. We're going to explore moving some of our inventory to Amazon FBA in the USA once the Kickstarter is done. We were trying to avoid doing this due to tariffs and Amazon fees. But shipping is really a challenge right now and Amazon probably can solve it without so much of our time having to be spent on it. Shopify has cross-listing on Amazon support along with tools to split inventory between then and our HongKong warehouse too so it shouldn't be too hard to get working.

Project Update
about 5 years ago – Tue, Apr 23, 2019 at 01:59:10 PM

Hi folks,

Here's what's going to behind the scenes:

OpenMV IDE v2.2.0 Released

We've released the next version of OpenMV IDE with firmware v3.3.1 which includes all the feature for making all the OpenMV Cam H7 modules work up to their maximum capabilities. When you get your OpenMV Cam H7 just download the latest IDE and update your firmware and you're good to go.

STM32H7 Clock Freq Bump

ST bumped the STM32H7 clock frequency from 400 MHz to 480 MHz. This extra performance will increase the OpenMV Cam H7 Core Mark score to 2400 making our core speed slightly faster than a Raspberry Pi 2 core speed of 2340 or so. We will release a new firmware version with the faster clock speed soon.

TensorFlow for Microcontrollers

In addition the above clock speed bump we're working on porting TensorFlow for Microcontrollers to the OpenMV Cam H7 right now. Our big focus moving forward will be getting the library working on our system and then building training features into the IDE to make it easy to do transfer learning using MobileNet. Google provides docker images for tensorflow so we should be able to wrap everything up and automate a lot of stuff so that you don't need to know anything about how to train nets. I'll have more information about this as the work progresses. Here's what we've done so far:  https://github.com/openmv/tensorflow-lib . Note that we're making our porting effort available for anyone with a Cortex-M4/M7 (and printf() support) to run. We hope to have the basic functionality port done quickly and then the IDE tooling will come later.

Shipping Status

We've shipped about 500 orders so far and should have another 200 going out by the end of the week. When we were doing inventory transfers recently our previous shipper over-counted our lens inventory and then wasn't able to provide us with all what we thought we had on hand. So, we had to buy new lenses to ship orders resulting in about 1.5 weeks of delay. Anyway... we have all the lenses back in stock right now and we hope to finish more or less shipping all orders by the end of next week.

FLIR GroupGets Backers: Your order is going out this week to GroupGets. They should receive the bundle of goods next week. We've packaged everything up such that it will be easy for them to ship units to backers.

Store

We had previously opened our store for orders since we have plenty of cameras and shields in stock. However, upon doing that we started getting emails from folks asking when their order was going to be shipped. So, until we finish shipping all Kickstarter orders our store is in pre-order only mode. Once we've completed shipping all Kickstarter orders we'll set it back up for buying immediately. You can still pre-order from our store if you like however.