Hey Everybody!
Hope your new year is going well! You know when someone asks what you’ve been up to, and you’ve been super busy, and you try to explain, but everything that comes out of your mouth sounds kind of lame? The last couple weeks have been like that. The focus has been on firmware and software. There’s been whole slew of tweaks, improvements and fixes all over the place, but nothing “huge”. And so in that sense this update is pretty much the opposite of a cool demo, but to summarize, there’s been excellent progress lately, just not anything that can described with a cool pic or video.
Much of the work has been focused on the color signatures and the code that generates them, such as getting the lookup tables to generate quickly and efficiently, writing a region growing routine to do a simple object segmentation during “teach” mode, and saving and loading the color signatures from flash. We’ve made good progress on the Arduino libraries. We’ve improved the image rendering modes in Pixymon and made them more general purpose. We ran into some memory issues, fixed them, uncovered a USB issue, fixed it. A Heap issue was uncovered and fixed. Many comments added. Lots of coffee consumed….. still reading? (sorry!)
Manufacturing is ramping up. We have 4000 Pixys double-bagged and double-boxed, waiting patiently for lenses and firmware to make their little Pixy selves complete. We’re interviewing candidates to help with the Big Shipment and the tasks leading up to it. And we have little Pixy boxes. Here— take a look!
OK, the schedule– we’re trying to stick to the dates we laid out 4 weeks ago, namely feature completion the week of January 27 and start-ship the week February 17. We’re behind, but not hugely so, and trying to make up time wherever possible. We promise not to cut corners. The next couple weeks are the home stretch, or close to it, development-wise. We’ll be focusing more on Pixymon. There’s a cool feature (aspect?) of Pixymon that we’ve worked hard to maintain— Pixymon is a generic front-end and not tied to any particular algorithm (such as color blob analysis.) More on that in the next update as well as the status of the final push!
As always, thank you so much for your interest, support, and patience!
