Hello everyone, thank you for signing up and backing this project!
In this update will cover the campaign status, planned changes to various boards associated with the Vision SoM ie. the Developer kit, SoM, and the breakout board, and a campaign extension.
Planned Modification to Boards:
Developer Board
Based on user feedback, we’re decided to make some improvements to the Developer board:
- Add a Raspberry Pi hat connector footprint to allow the Developer Kit to be used with a Pi Zero (W).
- Reduced complexity
- Improved layout
The RPi connector pinout is currently being added and the other optimizations have already been implemented.
Any current and future orders placed for a Developer board or the Developer Kit will include this improved version of the Developer board. This will not change the price of the Development board. We’ll share an updated rendering as soon as it’s available.
More Details: Raspberry Pi Hat Connector Pinout
The Developer board will have the added feature of a Raspberry Pi connector pinout. This leverages the extensive RPi ecosystem to develop applications using the Vision FPGA SoM.
This enables new use cases for a Raspberry Pi Zero W (including the ones as shown in Adafruit Pi Hat:
- Image Sensing: The RPi can now capture images without adding the high resolution camera (Normally $29.95 or so).
- Microphone Capability: The Pi can use the MEMS microphone on the SoM over the I2S port, enabling you rPi to listen!
- Accelerometer/Gyroscope: The Pi can talk directly to the IMU on the SoM enabling motion sensing on the Pi.
- AI acceleration: The RPi while being quite capable in terms of running Linux, isnt as good at running Neural Networks as the FPGA on the SoM. The RPi hat option enables the RPi and Vision SoM to take advantage of the strengths of each device.
SoM
The SoM is being modified as follows for the production run based on feedback:
- Align the Pixart and Himax sensor optical centers
- Shift the image sensor and IMU to be symmetrical in the board
- Move the IMU to the backside and center it on the optical center of the image sensors so that this can be used for various AR/VR type applications
- Moved the OV flex connector pinout
- Add mounting holes for mechanical stability
Status: This was a pretty major change and resulted in re-layout of large portions of the SoM. The layout has been completed and is being checked for errors etc.
Breakout Board
The breakout board is functional. However, as you can see from the picture below, the soldered on 0.1" headers are close to shorting the SoM castellations, not good!
Status: The board has been redesigned by widening it.
Campaign Extended!
We are extending the campaign date as we would like to give more time to the community to digest the changes in the hardware (especially the addition of the RPi hat option). This decision was made with Crowd Supply’s support and consultation.
The design changes require a prototype run for verification. The extension of the campaign also adds to the timeline, requiring us to push out our expected ship date to early January 2021.