Punto Maximo's Von VisionAI is an All-In-One Open Source Computer Vision Development Station

Punto Maximo is preparing to launch a crowdfunding campaign for the Von VisionAI, an all-in-one open source tablet delivering on-device computer vision capabilities through a built-in 48 megapixel camera.

"Two years ago our company started developing a red light camera," Punto Maximo's Avinadad Mendez tells us. "We wanted to develop a product to save lives and reduce accidents on the road. After we finished our design and tested it, we believed the capabilities and numerous possibilities of our design far exceeded what we could develop on our own. We also strongly believe in open source, as it was and currently still is the cornerstone of all our work."

"We knew many engineers around the world needed a platform to more quickly develop, test, and deploy their edge AI [Artificial Intelligence] product ideas, a powerful and versatile edge AI development platform that could save them entire months if not years of concept development and idea validation," Mendez continues. "Thus we took the decision to open source our design and begin our campaign on Crowd Supply. That's Von VisionAI."

The tablet itself is based around a 7" 1080×600 90Hz touchscreen display, to the rear of which is a Sony IMX586 48 megapixel camera sensor. Inside the housing is Punto Maximo's custom single-board computer, built atop the Rockchip RK3566 system-on-chip — giving it four Arm Cortex-A55 cores running at up to 1.8GHz, an Arm Mali G52 graphics processor, and a neural processing unit (NPU) coprocessor delivering one tera-operations per second (TOPS) for on-device artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads. To this, the company has added 4GB of LPDDR4X memory and 32GB of eMMC storage, expandable via microSD Card.

That's not the only expansion on offer, either: the SBC includes a mini-PCI Express 2.0 (mPCIe 2.0) slot, while a USB Type-C connector pulls double-duty as a data connector and charging port. There's an HDMI port for an external display, gigabit Ethernet connectivity, and numerous general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins. On the software side, Punto Maximo offers a customizable Buildroot tree for compiling a Linux distribution.

The company has already released the source code for the project, along with design files for the tablet enclosure — and will provide schematics soon and PCB design files at the end of the campaign, most likely under the permissive MIT license. "Back when we started this project two years ago, we didn't quite have the vision of open sourcing it just yet," Mendez tells us, "so our design files are still a bit messy and hard to follow. We want to clean them up and make them readable before release."

Interested parties can sign up to be notified when the campaign goes live — likely in late October or early November — on the Von VisionAI Crowd Supply campaign page.