This may be an obvious question but I was a bit confused and thrown off by the paywall on the open MV IDE, not that I don’t agree with it or have an issue with it.
I’m looking to develop a product that will eventually go into production and after some fairly extensive research I believe I’ve settled on the i.MX RT1060 as the processor and when looking into development boards the OpenMV Cam RT1062 is the best by far, with all of the community support, libraries and documentation. I believe I read somewhere at the open MV project was roughly centered around this idea, that is, prototyping and developing for a production product. I’m hoping maybe I can get some clarify on a few things regarding this topic. Can I use Open MV IDE to develop my code and right firmware to production units? Will the “form key” cause an issue when trying to use the IDE for this purpose and will purchasing a license for the IDE allow me to flash firmware to new chips and production units. Keep in mind I am in the very early stages of development and not familiar with NXP products and workflow. Also I fully intend to support the project by purchasing all items from official Open MV retailers.
If you’re curious the project involves object tracking on a sensor platform. The product is intended to track an object(s) location, identify objects potential and keep various outputs trained on the object. If you have any thoughts on suggested algorithms, model training or technical insights that would be greatly appreciated.
Hi, yes, we ask that you pay the license fee to use the IDE with custom boards. There’s no production fee per unit unless you use the IDE with your product. E.g. you are developing a dev board to compete with us selling dev boards using our tools.
(Regarding using our tools to flash your production boards… you can, and the system will bug you about each board wasting programming time. Your choices here are to pay for an increased cost in production programming by the factory or license your product as an official OpenMV Cam and then we can give you the ability to use the IDE to program your boards without any issues. You are also free to figure out how to use official NXP tools and develop your own workflow that you will need to maintain.)
That said, it’s expected that any serious enterprise customer looking to scale will license the system design from us if you are doing full custom boards based on the IP. This is so you have help support for using the MCU and software. If you are doing a custom board, you should not expect us to offer free help and support and fix bugs with the system for your application unless you are buying the RT1062 OpenMV Camera board. Licensing support from us typically makes more sense in the long run given engineering costs. Yes, you can maintain your own custom tools and hire someone for that… but, do you want to? This can end up being more expensive.
If you’re curious the project involves object tracking on a sensor platform. The product is intended to track an object(s) location, identify objects potential and keep various outputs trained on the object. If you have any thoughts on suggested algorithms, model training or technical insights that would be greatly appreciated.
Need specifics to advise.
I appreciate your insight and it has definitely given me some things to think about. I do think that licensing support sounds like a wonderful resource. To be clear though this is not a product that would be in competition with your board or even a development board at all. This will hopefully be a retail product and I am very interested in what it offers, it sounds like a tremendous opportunity for someone developing a product in the MV market. I will be purchasing OpenMV Cam through legitimate channels. I understand how important it is for a product like this to be purchased officially. I think sometimes people forget and just look for the best deal, they don’t think about the amount of time and effort that goes into putting together something like this …not to mention the need for financial support to ensure that the platform is further developed. About our product, it would not necessarily be open source accessible, there would be no need for the end user to utilize any of open MVs software, that would be for our use only in prototyping and developing this product. Of course all appropriate licensing and compensation is without question. This is a very small startup and we are trying to “hit way outside of our weight class” and the OpenMV platform would be an invaluable resource in realizing our goal. I would love to PM you if that’s possible, to give some more specific details and talk about options.
Sure, please email us at openmv@openmv.io.