[Dprglist] PAA5100JE Near Optical Flow SPI Breakout

[Murray Altheim]

On 9/07/21 2:22 pm, Karim Virani via DPRGlist wrote:
> Hey Murray,
> 
> After a month of waiting on the slow boat from Europe, the Pimoroni
> optical flow sensors have landed on my doorstep.  We'll probably
> play with these a bit from an rpi but the plan is to port the library
> to our regular Android controller.

Hi Karim,

That sounds like an interesting challenge.

> BTW, at our State Championship competition I was approached by someone
> who knew of my comments on the Pimoroni forum and he said that his
> company had bought out an entire production run of the units based on
> prior testing of pixart samples.

Ahh, that explains why Pimoroni had put them on their website and then
they suddenly became unavailable until recently. I'm sure Pimoroni were
only too happy to oblige, but it was a bit of a mystery to the rest of us.

> Do I remember correctly - that you said something about a better library
> for these than the default one based on the drone version of the product?
> If so, can you point us at it?

As I have reported in my blog post (see below), Pimoroni have updated
their pmw3901 library to include support for the new board rather than
issue a separate library, so you just do:

    from pmw3901 import PAA5100

and it injects whatever secret sauce configuration is necessary to gain
the improved performance.

> If you have any lessons to share from your experimentation, please let me know.
The blog post has been in my TODO list for too long, unfinished, so I've
just posted it now:

     The PAA5100JE Near Optical Flow Sensor
     https://robots.org.nz/2021/07/09/the-paa5100je-near-optical-flow-sensor/

Cheers,

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim <murray18 at altheim dot com>                       = =  ===
http://www.altheim.com/murray/                                     ===  ===
                                                                    = =  ===
     In the evening
     The rice leaves in the garden
     Rustle in the autumn wind
     That blows through my reed hut.
            -- Minamoto no Tsunenobu