In the discussion period that followed my Sawppy presentation at RSSC, there was a discussion on machine vision. When discussing problems & potential solutions, JeVois camera was mentioned as one of the potential tools for machine vision problems. I wrote down the name and resolved to look it up later. I have done so and I like what I see.

First thing that made me smile was the fact it was a Kickstarter success story. I haven't committed any of my own money to any Kickstarter project, but I've certainly read more about failed projects than successful ones. It's nice when the occasional success story comes across my radar.

The camera module is of the type commonly used in cell phones, and behind the camera is a small machine vision computer again built mostly of portable electronics components. The idea is to have a completely self-contained vision processing system, requiring only power input and delivers processed data output. Various machine vision tasks can be handled completely inside the little module as long as the user is realistic about the limited processing power available. It is less powerful but also less expensive and smaller than Google's AIY Vision module.

The small size is impressive, and led to my next note of happiness: it looks pretty well documented. When I looked at its size, I had wondered how to best mount the camera on a project. It took less than 5 minutes to decipher documentation hierarchy and find details on physical dimensions and how to mount the camera case. Similarly, my curiosity about power requirements was quickly answered with confirmation that its power draw does indeed exceed the baseline USB 500mW.

Ease of programming was the next investigation. Some of the claims around this camera made it sound like its open source software stack can run on a developer's PC and debugged before publishing to the camera. However, the few tutorials I skimmed through (one example here) all required an actual JeVois camera to run vision code. I interpret this to mean that JeVois software stack is indeed specific to the camera. The whole "develop on your PC first" only means the general sense of developing vision algorithms on a PC before porting to JeVois software stack for deployment on the camera itself. If I find out I'm wrong, I'll come back and update this paragraph.

2017-04-27-15-14-36When I looked on Hackaday, I saw that one of the writers thought JeVois camera's demo mode was a very effective piece of software. It should be quite effective at its job: get users interested in digging deeper. Project-wise, I see a squirrel detector and a front door camera already online.

The JeVois camera has certainly earned a place on my "might be interesting to look into" list for more detailed later investigation.