Vizy gets 9/10 in MagPi Magazine product review!

Vizy was reviewed in the April issue of Magpi Magazine, which is the official Raspberry Pi magazine. The reviewer notes “Vizy is a great platform for exploring machine learning possibilities. We particularly liked MotionScope…” and concludes “Vizy provides you with a great introduction to image recognition that does a lot of the heavy lifting, allowing you to focus on practical projects.

We completely agree and appreciate the review of our little guy!  You can check out the issue here.

New Vizy release!

Vizy software release 0.2.132 is out and ready to install.

Included in the latest release is an improved Object Detector Application. We’ve added the ability to create your own custom CNNs (convolutional neural networks) so you can detect practically anything you want. And once you create a custom CNN, you can easily share your it with others.

Object Detector can also text you when it detects something you find text-worthy. Use it to detect packages at your front door, the wrong car parked in your parking spot, or a hedgehog in the “no hedgehog” section of your garden!

Check out the video below:

New Vizy release

Hey everybody, 

Hope all’s well out there!  We have a new Vizy software release, version 0.1.100.  Among bug fixes, this release contains the second major release of the MotionScope application.  Sorry this took so dang long… Hofstadter’s law still has its grip on Vizy software development…

Among the new MotionScope features:

  • Named projects – you can save projects and settings using the familiar save, save-as, open, and close commands from the File menu..
  • Data export – you can export the raw data in various forms: table, csv, json, and xlsx
  • Advanced trigger modes – you tell Vizy to start recording when it senses motion, or you can use an external button plugged into Vizy.  
  • Start-shift – you can set the beginning of the recording in the past so that when you start recording, Vizy has already recorded the desired amount, so you don’t miss the start of the footage.
  • Camera perspective – you can change the perspective of the camera in software.  Sometimes Vizy’s image plane  isn’t parallel to the motion plane, which can result in lost motion, but you can now change Vizy’s perspective to capture all motion – it’s a bit like magic! 

You can check out the latest documentation here.  

Don’t forget to update!  

The Vizy Team

Vizy’s first review is in

Earlier this week, Hackaday posted a review of Vizy.  It being the first review (ever), we were a bit nervous…  But Vizy’s various talents, likeability, and general good looks carried the day.  Some excepts:

“I found it ridiculously simple to get up and running, and it was just as easy to make changes of my own, and start getting ideas…  I was running pre-installed examples written in Python within minutes, and editing that very same code in about 30 seconds more.  …  Vizy has a level of polish and set of features that I really hope to see more of in future products like this.”

Kudos to our favorite hacker-friendly AI camera!

Pet Companion

Hi Everybody,

Hope all’s well out there!  We saw an opportunity to cross off two things on our software to-do list before tackling more advanced MotionScope features.   The latest software release includes a new example that will help you keep tabs on your pet, and possibly feed him/her treats throughout the day remotely.  Check out Pet Companion:

Pet Companion also has a nice tutorial that will help you learn how to create new Vizy Applications.

Also included in this release is Web Sharing, which allows you to access your Vizy from anywhere on the Internet, even if your Vizy is behind a firewall or router, which is typically the case.  Web Sharing is perfect for an application like Pet Companion —  you know, so you can share the URL with your friends.  Now they too can say hello and give your little guy/gal treats.

Enjoy!  Oh, and don’t forget to update!

The Vizy Team

 

MotionScope

Hey Everybody,

Hope all’s well out there!  A new Vizy software release just landed, and contained within is the first version of MotionScope (yay!)

Read more about it here, give it a try, and then meet us over at the forum to tell us what you think!

Also contained within this release is improved mobile support.  Getting things to render perfectly on all screen sizes is nearly impossible, but this release includes several improvements that make things more visually appealing and easier to use on smaller screens.

Additionally, there are lots of behind-the-scenes improvements… Enjoy!

The Vizy Team

Good news for the new year!

Hey Everybody,

We’ve done it!  All Kickstarter rewards and pre-orders have left the facility and are on their way to you.  If you are backer number 300 to 450, you should have received an email confirmation and if you haven’t received your reward yet, you should soon.  If your backer number is greater than 450 or you purchased a pre-order, your Vizy is on its way to our fulfillment partners and will ship within the week.  Nice!

On the software development side of things, we’ve been focusing on the MotionScope application, and it’s close to its first release.  Check out the quickie demo video below.

Additionally, we recently added some useful docs about how to implement a squirrel defense system and how to mount your outdoor enclosure if you plan on running the birdfeeder application.

Thanks for helping us through the last year — here’s to bigger and better things for 2022!

The Vizy Team

Just the facts

Hey Everybody,

We have some good news!  We received the enclosures on Friday, so we wanted to give an update without any of the speculations we’ve seen in the last several updates.  So here goes, just the facts:

  • We received the enclosures 3 days ago.
  • Vizy manufacturing has resumed.
  • All remaining KS rewards and pre-orders will be shipped before the end of January 2022.

That last one has a degree of speculation, but we have plenty of experience manufacturing Vizys to make this claim.   We also have plenty of stock for retail sales and distribution after the KS rewards and pre-orders have shipped.  And we’ve learned some valuable lessons about manufacturing in this day and age…

Thank you so much for your patience!  Here’s hoping 2022 will be a better year for the supply chains, small OEMs such as ourselves, and for the technically-minded trend-setters and early-adopters such as yourselves.

Happy Holidays!

The Vizy team

We’re at 99%

Hey Everybody,

Have you ever noticed that the progress bar for whatever you’re trying to get done on your computer often gets stuck at 99%?  It just sits there and taunts you with its almost done-ness, as if it’s daring you to throw something at the screen.  In my experience a few choice swear words are usually sufficient…  There should a word for this phenomenon because it happens all the friggin time…  we’ll call it Tantalizingly Almost, but Annoyingly Not Done, Yet, which makes the fun acronym TAANDY, rhymes with “dandy”, perhaps ironically so.

As you know, we’re waiting for Vizy’s plastic enclosures.   They have made the long journey across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal and have landed in Houston, where they now sit in a container freight station (CFS) warehouse, waiting to be processed and eventually shipped to us here in Austin.  Normally, imported goods spend no more than 48 hours in a CFS, but these are weird times, and it seems that these days, TAANDY begets more TAANDY as the delays make their way through the supply chain.  We’ve been told that once the shipment is released, we’ll likely receive them within 24 hours and that they could be released any day now, or it could take up to 2 weeks.

We’ll continue to push the freight forwarders and keep you informed… but right now we’re estimating that production will resume on December 17.

In the meantime, please join us in swearing at the screen.  The progress bar will reach 100%… thank you so much for your patience.

The Vizy Team