OpenMV: The Camera For Your Next Project

Last month we saw [Ibrahim] tackle the lack of cheap, high speed, high resolution serial cameras with full force. He designed a serial camera based on the STM32F4 microcontroller that’s the perfect solution to anyone wanting to add visual processing or machine vision to a project. It’s cheap, too: instead of the $100 or so you’d spend on a high-end serial camera, [Ibrahim]’s version only has about $15 in parts.

Now he’s back at it again, with 25 FPS face detection, 30 FPS color detection, a new board with a micro SD socket, and support for USB OTG full speed. [Ibrahim] has been hard at work deep in the bowels of the STM32F4 micro, playing around with the core coupled memory. This allows for some very fast image processing, combined with the micro running at 168 MHz makes for very fast face and color detection.

As for a few benchmarks for this camera, the maximum resolution is 1280×1024, and at 88×72 resolution this little board can output at 60 FPS. Of course everything is limited by the speed of the serial connection, but there’s a lot of potential in this small serial camera.

No word on how much this board will cost, but [Ibrahim] may be putting a few boards up on Tindie shortly. Here’s to hoping he’ll send us an email telling us when his store is open.

12 thoughts on “OpenMV: The Camera For Your Next Project

    1. No you didn’t :) Pixy is more powerful, has more memory and a whole team working on it, but it’s also bigger and more expensive, OpenMV is just me trying to do something useful and fun, but you can still do some of the cool stuff Pixy can do.

  1. Just a clarification, even though the sensor can output 1280×1024 pixels there’s no way to store that in memory long enough to be sent out the serial port at slow rates, so currently, the largest frame it can send out is limited by the on chip memory, however, with the new uSD it can buffer such frame on the card and then send it out, I’m also considering a different sensor which has JPEG compression and possibly a way to send out larger frames without needing more memory.

  2. do threshold detect and center of blob detection (and a measure or roundness) and stream out coords of such points and you have a high speed motion capture camera. Need at least 8 of them…

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