Onion Tau is an affordable 3D depth LiDAR camera (Crowdfunding)

Onion Tau

Onion is better known for its Omega IoT boards running OpenWrt, but the company has now come up with a completely different product: Onion Tau 3D depth camera equipped with a 160×60 LiDAR sensor. The device plugs like a USB webcam to a host computer or board, but instead of transferring standard images, the camera produces 3D depth data that can be used to detect thin objects, track moving objects, and be integrated into other applications leveraging environment mapping such as SLAM (Simultaneous localization and mapping). Onion Tau LiDAR camera (TA-L10) specifications: Depth technology – LiDAR Time of Flight Depth stream output – 160 x 60 @ 30 fps Depth range – 0.1 to 4.5 meters Depth field of view (FOV) – 81˚ x 30° Grayscale 2D camera image sent with 3D depth map data Host interface – USB Type-C port Dimensions – 90 x 41 x 20 mm; 4x […]

Raspberry Pi 4 Vulkan Project Status & Future Plans – Q4 2020

Current status of Vulkan driver

Igalia has been developing a new open-source Mesa driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 since December 2019 and announced the implementation of the classical triangle Vulkan demo last February. Four months after the announcement of the Vulkan effort for Raspberry Pi 4 (v3dv), they merged with Mesa upstream. This means Raspberry Pi 4’s v3dv Vulkan driver has become part of the official Mesa drivers. Thus, bringing several advantages, like easy to find as it is now available on the official Mesa repository. Bugs can now be filed on the official Mesa repository bug tracker. In June, they passed over 70,000 tests from the Khronos Conformance Test Suite for Vulkan 1.0 and had an implementation of a significant subset of the Vulkan 1.0 API. This does not mean that the driver is ready for production use as they have implemented the full Vulkan 1.0 API.  They are now passing over 100,000 tests in the Kronos […]

Panfrost Gets First 3D Renders on Bifrost GPU (Mali-G31) including Basic Texture Support

Collabora has been working on Panfrost open-source Arm Mali GPU driver for over a year. The drive aims to support both Midgard and Bifrost families. But so far, the company had mostly focused on Midgard (Mali-T6xx/T7xx) GPUs with for example experimental OpenGL ES 3.0 support announced last February. Collabora engineers, such as Alyssa Rosenzweig, have now started to work on Bifrost support, and some good progress has been made since they managed to have Panfrost render the first 3D graphics with basic texture support using a platform with an Arm Mali-G31 GPU. Alyssa notes that while Midgard and Bifrost have a similar command stream requiring a few changes, the Bifrost instruction set is completely different and required building a new compiler from scratch. This leads to changes to the Intermediate Representation (IR), 16-bit data support, a different register allocation mechanism due to adapt to irregular vector architectures, and the latter […]

STEEReoCAM is a 3D Stereo Camera for NVIDIA Jetson Nano, TX2, & AGX Xavier Dev Kits

STEEReoCam 2MP 3D Stereo Camera The latest e-con systems camera added to the lineup is the STEEReoCam. A 2MP 3D MIPI compliant stereo camera that works with the NVIDIA Jetson Nano, AGX Xavier, and Jetson TX2 development kits.   Improved Overall Function The camera has greater accuracy and depth range, with an OmniVision 1/2.9″ OV2311 global shutter CMOS sensor.  And the STEEReoCam comes bundled with CUDA the proprietary accelerated stereo SDK, that uses the GPU in the NVIDIA Tegra processors. AI and IoT Applications The camera is targeted towards depth sensing, AVG, robotics, face and gesture recognition, drones, medical procedure robots, and embedded visions. Software Development Kit e-Con Systems provides a Software Development Kit (SDK) package for the camera designed to work with NVIDIA Jetson development boards. The SDK is built on OpenCV 3.4.2 and CUDA Compute Capability 5.3/7.2/6.2. Sample Linux applications, some of which are shown in the video […]

Mediatek Helio X20 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 – 3D Graphics Benchmarks and CSR2 Game

I’ve been using Vernee Apollo Lite smartphone with a Mediatek Helio X20 deca-core ARM Cortex A72/A53 processor coupled with an ARM for a little over a year. Recently, I’ve received Xiaomi Mi A1 smartphone for a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 SoC featuring eight ARM Cortex A53 cores and an Adreno 506 GPU. In theory, the latter is a downgrade, and the Xiaomi phone is indeed quite slower in Antutu with overall score of 60,161 points against 85,840 points in the Mediatek phone. 3D graphics performance is also lower with 12,849 vs 17,828 points. Both smartphone have the same resolution (1920×1080), so it’s a little confusing to be told you’d “better to play games in low quality mode” for the Mediatek phone, and “game performance is mid-level” for the Snapdragon one. But anyway Helio 20 should work better in 3D games than Snapdragon 625 if we are to believe the numbers. Most […]

Google Introduces Draco Open Source 3D Mesh Compression Tool

Specific compression and/or encoding algorithms are used for video, audio, and files, and each time one watches a video, listens to music, or downloads a file from the Internet, the amount data has likely been reduced thanks to the implementation of one of those algorithms. Google has been involved in the development of some algorithms and their implementation such as VP8/VP9/VP10 video codecs, and brotli file compression. With the emergence of virtual and augmented reality applications and accompanying 3D mesh data, the company has also worked on 3D data compression, and just unveiled Draco. A simple web search showed me some other 3D mesh compression tools are already available including Open3DGC and OpenCTM, but Google decided to compare Draco to GZIP instead, and it indeed offers much better compression than this general purpose file compression tool. Encoding and decoding also appear to be fairly fast, although Google did not compare […]

Vapor Cooled ASUS Zenfone AR Smartphone Comes with 8GB RAM, Supports Google DayDream and Tango

ASUS Zenfore AR is an interesting beast, powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor, it’s the first processor I’ve heard to come with 8GB RAM, and also the first to support both Google DayDream virtual reality, and Google Tango 3D depth sensing camera. On top of that, it’s allegedly cooled by an “advanced vapor cooling system”. Zenfone AR (ZS571KL) specifications: SoC – Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 quad core processor up to 2.35 GHz with Adreno 530 GPU System Memory – 6 to 8 GB LPDDR4 RAM Storage – 32, 64, 128 or 256GB UFS 2.0 flash, micro SD/SDCX card slot up to 2TB, 5GB ASUS WebStorage for file, 100GB Google drive for 2 years Display – 5.7″ WQHD (2560×1440) AMOLED display with Gorilla Glass 4, 10-finger capacitive touch Camera Tricam system with 23MP autofocus, motion tracking, and depth sensing cameras (Tango) 8MP front-facing camera with autofocus dual LED flash Video – […]

Parrot S.L.A.M Dunk is a Ubuntu & ROS Computer with 3D Depth Cameras for Drones & Robots

Parrot and Canonical have partnered to develop the Parrot S.L.A.M.dunk development kit for the design of applications for autonomous navigation, obstacle avoidance, indoor navigation and 3D mapping for drones and robots, and running both Ubuntu 14.04 and ROS operating systems. The name of the kit is derived from its “Simultaneous Localization and Mapping algorithm” (S.L.A.M) allowing for location without GPS signal. Parrot S.L.A.M Dunk preliminary specifications: SoC – NVIDIA Tegra K1 processor Camera – Fish-eye stereo camera with a 1500×1500 resolution at 60fps Sensors – Inertial-measurement unit (IMU), ultrasound sensor up to 15 meters range, magnetometer, barometer Video Output – micro HDMI USB – 1x micro USB 2.0 port, 1x USB 3.0/2.0 port Weight – 140 grams Parrot S.L.A.M dunk can be fitted various drones and robotic platforms such as quadcopters and fixed-wings, rolling robots and articulated arms using mounting kits. The computer module is then connected to the host […]

Memfault IoT and embedded debugging platform