OpenCV for Beginners : May 18, 2021
almost 5 years ago – Wed, May 12, 2021 at 12:42:36 AM

Dear friends, 

We want to give you a heads up that the OpenCV course team is about to announce the pre-launch of a Kickstarter campaign for an introductory computer vision and AI course, OpenCV for Beginners.

The team producing this new OpenCV course (and Kickstarter) is separate from the one developing OAK.  

So no resources are being taken away from the production, delivery, shipment, etc. of the OpenCV AI Kit stretch goals (OAK-D-WIFI, OAK-D-POE, and OAK-1-POE).  (On that, the OAK-D-WIFI have finished production and are in the shipping warehouse at EasyShip/UFL, see here.)

The material in the course may not be directly applicable to the development on OAK.   If you are wanting to learn more how to use your OAK, check out the free course here. 

OpenCV for Beginners is geared towards folks who want to learn how to use the OpenCV library, about computer vision and AI in general,  starting from little to no experience.  So a more fully-rounded AI/CV experience than the targeted use of the OpenCV AI Kit.

The OAK team at Luxonis continues to work hard to fulfill our OAK Kickstarter stretch goal models (more on that in this update). 

Many thanks

OpenCV Team

OAK-D-WIFI Arrived at EasyShip/UFL Today! OAK-D-POE T1 Samples
almost 5 years ago – Tue, May 11, 2021 at 04:10:49 PM

Hi everyone,

Just a very quick update that all OAK-D-WIFI production is finished, boxed up, palletized, and already delivered to EasyShip/UFL as of today.

These take about 1 calendar week to inbound into the UFL warehouse, so we are expecting that these will be fully inbounded by this time next week, and that OAK-D-WIFI shipments will start going out next week.

There are some small number of these orders (somewhere around 133) that also contain OAK-1 and OAK-D.  For the OAK-D, these are being delivered from our contract manufacturer (from a coordinated production of more units).  For OAK-1, we've been working with floship to get these out of their warehouse and into UFL.  But so far, we've been unable to get floship to give us our inventory.  As usual, floship is not indicating any problem - it's just each day we check in to see if we can pick it up - and they say it's again not ready.  So for those that have OAK-D-WIFI _and_ OAK-1 in their orders, we're going to just ship twice - as we've learned the hard lesson to never count on floship.  

And we also got OAK-D-POE T1 samples last night, and they look pretty cool.  See the double-sided antireflective-coated Corning Gorilla glass reflecting my ring-light.  It results in a pretty neat visual effect:

Both OAK-D-POE and OAK-1-POE are still on track for June shipment.  We think mid-June, but we're candidly unsure.  The chip shortage is making everything a wildcard.

Thanks,

Brandon

INDIA ONLY Update
almost 5 years ago – Sun, May 09, 2021 at 03:34:07 PM

Hi Backers From India,

So in preparation of the shipments that will be going out this month (May) and next (June), we have been paying extra (obsessive) attention to the shipments from our web-stores (https://store.opencv.ai/ and https://shop.luxonis.com/) to see if any problems are arising in any given countries.

What we've found is that shipments to India right now are nearly a 100% loss-rate.  We expect this is to do with the large second pandemic wave impacting India.

So to prevent the loss of your OAKs - and to help keep safe workers who would be delivering these non-essential devices - we have decided to hold shipments to India until the situation improves.   We hope the situation will improve as quickly as possible.  

We cannot predict the future of this wave of the pandemic, so we are unsure when these shipments to India will go out.  We will keep backers from India updated, and we will continually monitor the impact of the pandemic on shipping/shipment-loss-rates, and our best-guess-effort as to when we would not be putting workers at risk, to make a decision as to when it is safe to do these bulk shipments.

Stay safe, and the world's wishes are with you.

Best,

Brandon

Roboflow Launches Streamlined Edge AI Deployment on OpenCV AI Kit, Plus: OpenCV Weekly Webinar Features #OAK2021 Teams
almost 5 years ago – Fri, May 07, 2021 at 02:34:23 AM

Hello, AI innovators!

If you follow the newswire, you might've already seen that OpenCV Silver Partner Roboflow have released brand new OAK-focused features this week, making it as easy and fast as possible to deploy to OpenCV AI Kit using their platform. You can read more about it in our joint press release and Roboflow's blog post.

With Roboflow's update, you can train, refine, and deploy models to OAK without writing a single line of code yourself. Even better, OpenCV AI Kit owners get free credits to Roboflow's system! If you haven't signed up yet, head over there today.

This isn't the only good news for OAK-fans today, though, as this AND next week's OpenCV Weekly Webinar are all about OpenCV AI Competition 2021. Joining Satya and Phil on the show this week was Ye Lu, of Team Cortic Tigers. They've been posting awesome videos to Twitter and LinkedIn featuring Charlie, the Little Robot That Could. This episode will be uploaded to the YouTube channel soon.

Here are the details for next week's webinar, with guest Gerard Espona from team Kauda:

Time: 9 AM Pacific Time, May 13th, 2021
Subject: Creating Digital Twins with OpenCV AI Kit and Unity
Hosts: Satya Mallick (CEO, OpenCV.org), Gerard Espona (Team Kauda)
Free Signup: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83231402214

The Cortic Tigers and Kauda teams were both featured in the first OpenCV AI Competition 2021 Team Profiles post.

As always we will reserve the last 15 minutes of the show for questions from the audience, and we like to reward folks who stick around until the end! See you there!

UPDATE on OAK-D-WIFI OAK-D-POE, OAK-1-POE Estimated Shipment Dates
almost 5 years ago – Mon, May 03, 2021 at 11:35:13 PM

Hi everyone,

We have a short-but-sweet update this time.  As we updated last time (here), OAK-D-WIFI will likely ship in mid-May and OAK-D-POE and OAK-1-POE will likely ship mid-June.

We look to still be on track for these dates.  The highest-risk to slip further is OAK-1-POE.  More details on that below.

OAK-D-WIFI Boxing

• All OAK-D-WIFI have completed, but our power supply vendor is late - so we are waiting on these to arrive to do the final boxing and shipment to our 3rd party logistics (EasyShip and UFL, this time).  
• Despite the power supplies being late, it is still looking like mid-May shipment of OAK-D-WIFI is still hittable

Here's what the OAK-D-WIFI kits will look like (taken with the power supply samples we keep on-hand):

OAK-D-POE T1 Samples

We got "T1 Samples" which are the first samples to come out of the die-cast molding that was made custom for these.  These are looking good, but need some refinements to improve production quality (mainly the corners were incorrectly tucking in).  So the tooling is being updated as a result.  Some examples below.  We are also changing from bright-silver to matte-silver as our CM recommends it for overall appearance and lack of tooling artifacting.  

OAK-1-POE T1 Sample Failure

While the T1 samples of OAK-D-POE look pretty good, the OAK-1-POE T1 check did not go so well:

In this case, the design of the mold was not sufficient for removing the cast part.  So it is being refined for T2 to reduce the probability of this happening.  You can see a partially-failed OAK-1-POE enclosure on the right.  

As of now, this does problem is not seeming like it will further delay OAK-1-POE delivery (i.e. it seems we are still on-track for mid-June shipment) but we'll keep everyone updated if it does.

Thanks,

Brandon and the Luxonis team