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First of all, thanks for you frank comments. I work for Leopard Imaging, and honestly, I know recently our support is not as good as expected. I wanted to give you some insights of what we are doing and what we plan to do. Unfortunately, I will be out of town today, for sure I will give you the details tonight.

Hi Tony

Thanks for your input, that is good for us to improve our support, we are trying to enrich our community support so that our fans can get it easily work on Leopardboard, during the last couples of months, we spent quite a few time to get several demos, they will be ready for downloading next week. The following are releasing lists next week:

- Vision kit DEMO: Leopardboard 365 + LI-VM34LP + Pico Project: Vision kit with software and demo application

- HD 720 USB Streaming video DEMO: Leopardboard 365 + LI-5M03, this will be binary only since it is licensed softwrae.

- HD 720 IPNC DEMO: Leopardboard 365 + LI-5M03 camera board, this will be binary only due to licensed software.

Basically, Leopardborad 365 should function in hardware including network, usb, audio, camera input, video output, LCD interface.

- Bil

Bill,

Does the "Vision kit DEMO" with the LI-VM34LP camera come with full (and open) source code?

Thanks,

Mike

This kit will have source code and binary files for downloading by early next week.

- Bill

There are several complaints in this forum. I'd like to take this chances to answer some questions.

Why are Leopardboards out of stock for so long?

A connector had been stuck in custom office for more than a month. It resulted in the Leopardboard shortage. We've received the boards this week. After we test them, they will be available next week.

Where can I find Sensor drivers?

In the current software package, we have the VGA driver for linux 2.6.29, 5M sensor driver and V034 driver for linux 2.6.18. The VGA driver is available on support page. The other two are in the RigdeRun package.

Can you provide all sensor drivers, and make them open source?

We have VGA to 5M several types of modules, but some of them have no driver. One reason is that we don't have bandwidth to develop and do the tests. As you may know, the margin of Leopardboards is so low that we have to take other projects to survive. And those projects keep us busy enough.

Another reason is that the driver contains intellectual property from sensor vendors. We don't have the right to disclose it.

That said, I understand that sensor driver plays a very important role in the whole imaging system. No doubt we need a sensor driver for the module. Therefor, I am going to create a project for common open source image sensor driver, yet it has a way to protect sensor vendor IP. This will be another thread. Hopefully we can find some volunteers to join this project.

What is your roadmap?

We will follow TI's Davinci roadmap and release low cost Leopardboards. The next one will be Leopardboard 368, which will incorporate the DM368 for 1080p H264 encoding. The schedule really depends on the availability of the DM368.

We won't have Leopardboard for high-end (high-cost) TI chips, such as DM6467, as this is not the Leopardboard's interest.

On software side, there will be more demo available. We just put the USB webcam demo on our download page. In about 1-2 weeks, we will have the IP netcam for the Leopardboard 365. And I think RidgeRun is going to have a new release for the Leopardboard 365.

The last one: I want my question to be answered ASAP.

We will put more resources to the community. We, together with all the community members, created this great community. This is our baby, on one will want to see it going away. Let's work together and make it better.

Hi Tony,

Thanks for the feedback, it's appreciated.

RidgeRun engineers have been for a long time the most active members on the forum, but our involvement later has dropped mainly to two reasons:

- We have our resources focused on creating a new version of the DM365 SDK. Our experience with the Leopard community is that the most important feature is proper support for the camera, and in the past we just rely on integrating the support for camera that we received for specific kernel versions. This has proven to be a dead-end as the kernel is a moving target and the support is kind of a hack. So we have been working on creating a driver for the cameras against the latest kernels so we can merge the support in mainline, along with the support for latest DVSDK and technology available for the DM365 chip. This approach will reduce the overhead of providing new features in the future and also will provide a decent development environment for people who wants to use the board (not to mention the availability of open source drivers).

- Many problems lately are related to DM365 SDK. The current SDK for DM365 is clearly marked as beta and also clearly marked and not including any support of any kind. Some of our engineers has been enthusiastic about the community and provided support for long time on their personal time.

Overall we are doing the best we can to support the community and provide a long-term platform for development. We hope that once we are done with the next SDK for DM365, we will have more time available to provide support in the forums as best as we can.

Diego