Tiny1: The World's Smallest Astronomy Camera

Sat Oct 1 '16 Announcement
over 9 years ago – Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 09:23:57 AM

Fortnightly update:

Hi everyone!

we're a day late in our update because we have good news and a survey for you to fill shortly!

Development - Hardware Bring Up!

We have achieved another major milestone in the hardware development! The V2.2 board is now running the operating firmware complete with UI. We had the firmware up since late last week. It appears to us now that the firmware is stable. Touch screen and display are all up. We are just waiting for the peripheral sensors to stabilize at the moment. The team is in touch with Qualcomm to adjust the resolution on the touch screen as well

Bring up activities should be completed in the upcoming 2 weeks, which leads us to manufacturing for fulfilment.

Manufacturing Fulfilment - BackerKit Alert

As our electronics development is progressing very well with the major roadblocks overcome, we would like to initiate manufacturing within the next week. With that, we would like your help to fulfil your BackerKit survey.

The BackerKit survey will be sent to you shortly. You’ll need to key in the following information:

1)      The choice of color – Midnight Black/Space Silver

2)      You wall of appreciation name

3)      Your reward bundle

4)      Shipping address

Please complete the survey as soon as possible. It is absolutely necessary to do the survey, so that we can order the parts to build the camera in time! We cannot guarantee the options you would like if the survey isn’t filled up.
 

Wall of Appreciation is up!

I guess that is our first delivery to everyone here! The Wall of Appreciation is up on our website! We realised that a few backers used aliases and interesting fonts. We’d update it to your preferred name after receiving your BackerKit survey.

Double Bronze at Spikes Asia!

Another milestone for the company happened last week. We jointly applied for the Spikes Asia Award with Young & Rubicam and won 2 bronze! Young & Rubicam helped us enormously for our campaign. We even went on expedition with Land Rover to tell the TinyMOS backstory thanks to them.

Here’s the collaboration video:

Award page: https://www.spikes.asia/winners/2016/digitalcraft/index.cfm?award=4

Thanks everyone for your support! We’ll be ordering the parts as soon as the BackerKit surveys come it. If you want to see metal shavings flying, crates of Tiny1 parts coming in, be sure to do your part and fill in the survey!

Best,

Grey Tan

On behalf of TinyMOS

Fri Sep 16 '16 Announcement
over 9 years ago – Fri, Sep 16, 2016 at 01:32:44 AM

Dear Backers,

Here’s the fortnightly update!

Development:

Remember the development hiccup in the last update? We’ve had some breakthrough progress on that. The custom design version 2.2 board is now powered up.

The team is working with Qualcomm to bring up customized features. The features enables advanced features such as the noise reduction algorithm among others that make Tiny1 small, powerful and user friendly.

We’re expecting firmware boot up in 1-2 weeks. Stay tuned!

Manufacturing:

We visited offshore facilities of our Singapore manufacturer last week. As Singapore is a tiny metropolitan city, space and human resources are scarce. The local facility focuses on manufacturing R&D starts the design for manufacturing processes.

They use larger factories in nearby city Batam, for volume production. We visited their extended facility to validate their capability to handle Tiny1 manufacturing orders. This ensures that both the prototype and mass production Tiny1 will meet the same high quality standard.

We’re are impressed with the facilities. The business park in Batam operates like a well-oiled machine, producing components for well-known international brands.

With the good manufacturing partners on board, we expect to ramp up production rather quickly upon finalising our hardware and software.

Software:

We receive frequent requests from backers on software capabilities of the Tiny1. We realized that as a diverse group of users, the use case are more varied than we can anticipate. As such, we’re proud to announce that we will be opening up avenues for scripting to control the cameras. The capabilities will be available as a future software update.

Scripting allows more advanced users to produce camera control scripts that allows for special imaging techniques. An example of that would be Magic Lantern for Canon, except we will officially support the community. Scripts can be shared to benefit the community!

A use case is for solar eclipse. We expected users to want the Tiny1 to capture the Diamond Ring Effect. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baily%27s_beads) After speaking to eclipse enthusiasts, we realized that we can do much more. Instead of just the Diamond Ring Effect, we can attempt to image the gossamer corona of the sun using high frame rate HDR techniques.

Credit: Luc Viatour/www.Lucnix.be

Opening up programming capabilities to the users is how we can move technology forward.

Best,

Grey

Like scripting possibilities? Want more features? Let us know in the comments!

Fri Sep 2 '16 Announcement
over 9 years ago – Fri, Sep 02, 2016 at 03:59:47 AM

Dear Backers,

We have new updates on the development of the Tiny1!

1. New aluminium enclosures!

We have received our all new, aluminium enclosures for the Tiny1. This is an updated version, with the final anodized finishing applied. We’re 95% close to the final delivery version in terms of form factor.

The aluminium housing is machined out of a solid block of 6061 grade aluminium for durability and heat sinking. The colors available at the moment are “Space Silver” and “Midnight Black”. Let us know which one you prefer in the comments! (Don’t worry, we’ll send out a survey before we deliver.)

Space Silver?

Or Midnight Black?

Anyone wants these as their wallpaper? Let us know in the comments below!

What else is required?

In terms of the enclosure we are still short of the plastic covers for the GPS and WiFi signals to pass through. Those would be made of glass reinforced plastic for durability. The covers in the photos are placeholders, laser cut from acrylic sheets in our prototyping lab.

We’re also awaiting the injection moulded dust covers for the various ports at the side of the camera

2. Electronics development

Electronics development hit a small speed bump. The last manufactured board faced teething issues in assembly. There were some cold joints (un-melted solder) in the circuit which prevented the board from booting up.

Most of the issues have been identified and the processes for assembly is being improved. The new board is awaiting RAM chips to arrive to complete the full assembly. These are expected to be solved next week.

While we were checking on the assembly hiccups, we also double verified on the design side of things. The engineers from Qualcomm checked and gave us the green light on the circuit design. We’re not expecting any major rework on the board which is a great sigh of relief.

We’ll have a new update in 2 weeks. Till then! Have a great weekend ahead.

Best regards,
Grey Tan

On behalf of TinyMOS team

Mon Aug 15 '16 Announcement
over 9 years ago – Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 04:01:59 AM

Dear Backers!

This is a major update for us. We’ve received our first fully assembled prototype.
 

The board manufacturing was done in Germany and we’re very pleased with the outcome. We're actively working on breathing life to the board with the firmware development. Overall, its a great development milestone for the TinyMOS Team!

Board, sensor side up

Board mounted in a late prototype enclosure
 

Here’s what we have accomplished while we were away for 2 weeks.

1. First prototype board run

   1. The first iteration of the complete prototype is manufactured. With that, we managed to do the following important steps
2. Finalizing manufacturing
   1. Electronics manufacturing suppliers are identified and queued up upon design verification
   2. Aluminium case manufacturing dimensioning check completed. Awaiting final surface treatment approval
   3. Assembly house sourcing. Several assembly houses in Singapore have been visited. We are very happy with a few of them. The final assembly and testing will happen in one of the trusted factories in Singapore

The development team is now working overtime to put it all together. Here’s the steps that are to follow that will help us put Tiny1 in your hands.

1. Firmware bring up
   1. The low level software that allows the board to boot into a higher level operating systems. For the geeks amongst us, this is kind of like writing the BIOS in the computer to run Windows/Linux/OSX.
2. Design verification
   1. Firmware bring up will determine if the hardware is fully compliant to our specifications.
3. Software bring up
   1. Basically implementing the operating system and the control software, similar to what you see on the Tiny1 app. If you haven’t already seen it, it’s on Google Play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tinymos.camera
   2. Customised control implementation. Software that gives Tiny1 the specialized features that allows it to capture the night skies
4. Packaging and shipping
   1. Determining the best packaging to ship the Tiny1 to your hands. Surprisingly, this is an art in logistics all to itself. We’ve amazing partners and advisers to get us through on this.

Where are we now?

We are in Bangalore, India at the moment. This trip to Bangalore allows us to contact Qualcomm’s engineering branch to further our development checklist. We’re thrilled to be meeting them this week. More updates to come.

Best regards,

Grey

On behalf of TinyMOS Team

Fri Jul 29 '16 Announcement
over 9 years ago – Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 03:22:02 AM

Dear Backers,

Here's our thank you video for your support! We ask you guys to write into us. We are reading our your support messages in this video.

We apologize for the radio silence for the past two weeks. We've been buried in meetings the past few weeks coordinating the manufacturers and suppliers. Do be patient with us, we will have a more substantial update shortly.

In the meanwhile, here's a blog post on our website. A local photographer captured the Milky Way from light polluted Singapore, during a meet-up. Read about it here - http://tinymos.com/milky-way-captured-singapore

Remember to join our mailing list and our social media for more frequent updates:
Mailing list: http://eepurl.com/bkY_nP
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thetinymos/
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