Hope everyone is having a great summer!  We have a new version PixyMon and firmware that supports color codes. It’s beta status. Please check it out, and tell us what you think.  (And if you don’t own a Pixy yet, go here!)

We also have a new library for communicating with Pixy over USB — we call it (appropriately) libpixyusb. It’s great if you want to talk to Pixy using a Raspberry Pi or Beagle Bone, or any other microcontroller with a USB port. (PixyMon already runs on these platforms, but if you wanted to write your own program to talk to Pixy over USB, there was no convenient way to do this. Libpixyusb makes it easy.)

We are actively working on a GCC port for the firmware. (Currently, Pixy’s firmware only compiles using the Keil compiler, which is a great tool, but it costs money.) The GCC port is coming along well and we hope to release it by the end of August. When it’s released you’ll be able to compile Pixy firmware with a free IDE (LPCXpresso) or just plain GCC. And, of course, this will bring Pixy firmware development to anyone who wants to develop their own vision algorithms. It’ll be awesome — there are lots of great ideas out there!

Speaking of algorithms, we’ve brought in some outside help to work on face detection for Pixy. We have the core algorithm working and are starting to work on optimization and platform support. A release date hasn’t materialized yet — we’ll keep you posted!