New image sensor evaluation kits to spark innovation with miniature cameras in consumer applications

Premstaetten, Austria (December 19, 2019) — ams (SIX: AMS), a leading worldwide supplier of high-performance sensor solutions, today releases the NanoVision and NanoBerry evaluation kits, which provide a ready-made platform for the development of innovative solutions based on the ams NanEyeC miniature image sensor.
The NanEyeC camera is a full-featured image sensor supplied as a tiny 1mm x 1mm surface-mount module. This small form factor can produce an amazing 100kpixel resolution up to 58 frames/s. As the NanEyeC offers a rare combination of small size, high image quality and high frame rate, it can be used for video applications in which the camera must be invisible to the end user, or be accommodated in an extremely small space. For instance, it is ideal for eye tracking in the increasingly popular virtual reality headsets. It can also be applied in user presence detection, to support automatic power on/off controls in Home and Building Automation (HABA) applications such as air conditioning, home robotics, appliances and smart lighting.

NanoVision board for lower-frame rate applications like presence detection

The new NanoVision demo kit for the NanEyeC is based on an Arduino development platform. It includes all necessary drivers to interface the sensor’s Single-Ended Interface Mode (SEIM) out-put to an Arm® Cortex®-M7 microcontroller. It also supports image processing including functions like color reconstruction and white-point balancing. Using the NanoVision support package, engineers can accelerate the development of low frame-rate applications like presence detection within the familiar Arduino hardware development environment.

NanoBerry board for more demanding operations like eye tracking or stereo vision systems

The NanoBerry evaluation kit uses a NanEyeC image sensor add-on board to the Raspberry Pi port and includes firmware to interface to the Raspberry Pi host processor. Engineers using the NanoBerry board can take advantage of the high performance Arm Cortex-A53-based processor to perform more demanding operations such as object detection, object tracking and computer vision functions provided by the OpenCV library.
The NanoBerry kit is a well equiped platform suitable for high frame-rate and low-latency applications such as eye tracking. Integration into the NanEye PC viewer enables full evaluation of the NanEyeC with access to all registers and raw image data.

The NanoVision board is available now to customers on request.
ams is demonstrating the NanoBerry kit at The Venetian Tower, Suite 30-236 at the CES exhibition (Las Vegas, NV, 7-10 January 2020). The kit will be available to customers in Q1 2020.