Developers, makers and enthusiasts building embedded vision machine learning projects may be interested to know that Adafruit has this week announced the arrival a new camera to their store in the form of the OpenMV Cam H7. Offering a super powerful micro controller board with a camera on board that you program in MicroPython for $65.
“It’s easy to run machine visions algorithms on what the OpenMV Cam sees so you can track colors, detect faces, and more in seconds, and thanks to the embedded functionality, you can then control I/O pins in the real-world. You program the OpenMV Cam in high level MicroPython scripts instead of C/C++. This makes it easier to deal with the complex outputs of machine vision algorithms and working with high level data structures. But you still have total control over your OpenMV Cam and its I/O pins. You can easily trigger taking pictures and video on external events or execute machine vision algorithms to figure out how to control your I/O pins.”
Specifications for the OpenMV Cam include :
– The STM32H743VI ARM Cortex M7 processor running at 480 MHz with 1MB of RAM and 2 MB of flash. All I/O pins output 3.3V and are 5V tolerant. The processor has the following I/O interfaces:
– A full speed USB (12Mbs) interface to your computer. Your OpenMV Cam will appear as a Virtual COM Port and a USB Flash Drive when plugged in.
– A μSD Card socket capable of 100Mbs reads/writes which allows your OpenMV Cam to record video and easy pull machine vision assets off of the μSD card.
– A SPI bus that can run up to 100Mbs allowing you to easily stream image data off the system to either the LCD Shield, the WiFi Shield, or another microcontroller.
– An I2C Bus, CAN Bus, and an Asynchronous Serial Bus (TX/RX) for interfacing with other microcontrollers and sensors.
– A 12-bit ADC and a 12-bit DAC.
– Three I/O pins for servo control.
– Interrupts and PWM on all I/O pins (there are 10 I/O pins on the board).
– And, an RGB LED and two high power 850nm IR LEDs.
Together with a removable camera module system allowing the OpenMV Cam H7 to interface with different sensors:
– The OpenMV Cam H7 comes with a OV7725 image sensor is capable of taking 640×480 8-bit Grayscale images or 640×480 16-bit RGB565 images at 60 FPS when the resolution is above 320×240 and 120 FPS when it is below. Most simple algorithms will run at above 60 FPS. Your image sensor comes with a 2.8mm lens on a standard M12 lens mount. If you want to use more specialized lenses with your image sensor you can easily buy and attach them yourself.
– A LiPo battery connector compatible with 3.7V LiPo batteries – Battery not included.
Source: Adafruit