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Intel issues end-of-life notice for RealSense Lidar
- dagmx 5y agoNot surprised. I had one of their devices, and it was just a mess. The resolution and reliability was not as good as comparable devices in the price range like Microsoft's Azure Kinect DK. Their software didn't work as well as what Microsoft cooked up, and it always felt like they put out this product and then just forgot about it.
- michaelt 5y agoEh, it doesn’t matter how low the price is for the Azure Kinect if you can’t buy them at the price. And you’re still stuck with USB C on Kinect, so it’s not like it lets you escape the consumer-grade reliability. If there are other devices with the same performance as the realsense lidar at a lower price, we’d all love to hear about them!
- dheera 5y ago"Consumer-grade" reliability really should be the highest-grade reliability. Cables get cantilevered by standing desks, rolled over by office chairs, bitten by dogs, chewed by babies, shoved in pockets and skiied with, and sat on. The people who designed USB-C were probably lazy people sitting in office chairs all day and never got out enough to see what real consumers do. I break about a USB-C cable a week. Never happened with headphone jacks, barrel connectors, IEC power connectors, and the like -- those are real consumer grade stuff, especially IEC.
- sudosysgen 5y agoGet a good quality cable. I break USB-C cables maybe once every year and a half, less often than I broke headphones or microUSB.
- dheera 5y agoI break Anker PowerLine+ cables all the time, not sure what's better. The connector design itself is shit, and the rubberized housing of the connector isn't mechanically supported as any self-respecting consumer-grade cable should be, all torque transfers to the PCB and that's horrible design.
- sudosysgen 5y agoI use IKEA nylon cables and they work perfectly fine. There's no reason the torque has to transfer to the PCB. That's just poor design. My phone's USB-C port is sleeved by the chassis for example, and so is the one in my GaN charger. There is zero torque transfer to the PCB, the chassis or frame takes all of the load. You can't rely on the cable to cancel the torque anyways, rubber yields and the normal force at the housing will pull the connector out slightly allowing for torque to still be applied to the connector, you have no choice than to brave either the female, male, or both ports to the chassis in some way.
- trashcan 5y agoI don't think I've ever broken a USB-C cable. How is everyone destroying them?
- sudosysgen 5y agoPersonally it's definitely my fault, they get stuck under stuff or I used my phone a lot while charging.
- klodolph 5y agoDefinitely shouldn’t be anywhere near highest reliability. Professional equipment has to stand up to a lot more use—like a camera you use every day, made with more metal and with thick rubberized grips. If I have a personal camera, I’ll take care not to drop it. If I’m a professional photographer, the question is how often it gets dropped. If we’re talking cables, “professional” grade (to me) means the connectors are going to get hundreds of cycles per year, and the cables might have to snake across the floor and get tread on five days a week. In general, “pro” grade stuff can be bigger, bulkier, more expensive. Then there’s stuff built for public spaces. ATMs, books in the public library, turnstyles at the metro, etc. All designed to be in close contact with people who either just don’t care or are actively trying to damage it. TBH I don’t know what the grade below consumer-grade would be.
- InfiniteRand 5y agoJerk grade reliability, this stuff will explode if stepped on
- derefr 5y agoI would say that the grade below consumer grade is “functional prop” grade. There’s a type of consumer electronics available on Wish/AliExpress/etc., which is designed for people who want to appear at a glance to be using a certain expensive device, for status-signalling reasons. The devices only have to be real enough to allow you to pretend to be using them without drawing suspicion, and only have to be rugged enough to last until the device being mimicked isn’t fashionable to have any more (at which point you get a new knock-off aping the new cool thing.) Surprisingly, these devices do work! They wouldn't be convincing otherwise. (How can you seem to be using the best new phone if you have to pull out a different phone to check your text messages? How can you seem to be playing a Switch or a PS4 if it doesn't turn on and show pictures and sound on the screen/a TV?) It's just that they work as terribly as you can imagine, given that costs are optimized to meet the minimum needs of someone playing pretend and no more.
- robotresearcher 5y agoMil-spec?
- ashtonkem 5y agoWhat in the world are you doing to those cables? I’ve been using USB-C full time since 2017 and I’ve never broken one.
- dheera 5y agoI go outside a lot. I think most likely the people who designed USB-C just sat in offices all day and didn't care at all to go ask skiiers, hikers, farmers, horseback riders, and bikers what their day was like.
- dumpsterdiver 5y agoThere comes a point where you have to take responsibility for your lifestyle, and recognize that nothing lasts forever. I too have never lost a USB-C cable, but I don’t move that cable much. When you move things a lot, they break. C'est la vie.
- dheera 5y agoNo, I disagree, I think consumer products should be designed to withstand consumer lifestyles. The designers should take responsibility for it, and I pay them for that. Headphone jacks worked great until they made goddamn headphones plug into USB-C as well and then they started breaking. Technology to withstand consumer lifestyles did exist until USB showed up.
- dumpsterdiver 5y agoI can totally commiserate with you on the headphones. Not even kidding, at one point I suspected that the powers that be got rid of 1/8 inch jacks just to electrocute political dissidents and enemies of the state by the push of a button. Is it really so far fetched? Thunderbolt can push 3 amps (please correct me if I’m wrong - I’m going by the USB-C spec), and .1 amps is lethal. Bzzzt! Anyway, I’m not trying to get down on you - I was just pointing out that nothing is intended to last forever. I once considered buying a military grade reinforced laptop that was way under specced just because I wanted to take it wherever I wanted and be able to bang it around. The truth is that electronics are easily damaged. Take fiber optic cables for instance. If you bend them ever so slightly too far they will stop working, because the throughput medium is glass. It’s just the nature of the medium. Arguably, we are the most advanced machines on this planet, and yet if we slip and hit our our head, our machinery could easily be put out of commission. I think it’s fair to expect machinery to fail outside of its intended use case. Have you ever bent a piece of copper wire back and forth and feel it get warm before it breaks? That’s just the nature of the material. It is what it is, you know? I’m not saying that you’re wrong to want or expect sturdier constructs - because they are often available for a price (using less abundant materials). I’m just saying that if you want that it’s probably not going to be consumer grade, and it’s not going to be cheap.
- ungamedplayer 5y agoConsumer-grade" reliability really should be the highest-grade reliability. Consumer-grade has hints in the name that it is intended to be consumed and purchased again. Business doesnt like making products that last for long life ad it means there is little chance of them buying another.
- Aromasin 5y agoI'd recommend the Stereolabs camera. It's a very versatile piece of hardware, quite mature in development from what I've been able to tell so far, and has a great SDK. Doesn't have lidar as far as I know but fills the same niche.
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- scrowe1 5y agoWonder when the same will ultimately happen to the stereo depth cameras. what are some good alternatives here?
- corndoge 5y agoI heard the whole division is shutting down so probably won't be long now.
- IshKebab 5y agoYeah it sounds like they are just selling off stock: https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/intel-says-it-s-winding-down-realsense-camera-business https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/intel-says-i...
- zwieback 5y agoI thought that already happened? I think they are just selling what they have now but stopped development. Keyence, Flir and a few other established machine vision companies have stereo systems but nothing like RealSense, which was trying to make stereo more of a mainstream application.
- rcv 5y agoThey aren't officially EOLing the stereo cameras yet, but their assurances about how long they'll remain in production have been very hand-wavey. Does FLIR actually have a stereo solution? Back when they were Point Grey they sold the Bumblebee, but all of the stereo processing was done on the host machine.
- zwieback 5y agoYeah, I guess that's obsolete too. My experience with stereo is that there's so much work in calibration and ensuring you get reliable correlation results between regions from the two cameras that plug-and-play solutions are very hard.
- rcv 5y agoThis is a real shame - I just finished lobbying to use these at work after some very successful initial prototypes. Does anyone have any experience with the TI mmWave sensors[1] for AMR collision avoidance? [1] https://www.ti.com/sensors/mmwave-radar/overview.html https://www.ti.com/sensors/mmwave-radar/overview.html
- drno123 5y agoMy company built several successfull products using TI’s mmWave sensors. If you’d like more info, send me your contact to mmwave@mailinator.com, I will be checking that mailbox today and tomorrow.
- madars 5y agoYou probably don't want to use mailinator.com address for this: anyone can read messages sent to it.
- snovv_crash 5y agoHonestly, I have no idea what Intel was doing playing with sensors and robots. I think the previous CEO was trying to diversify, seeing his failures in the CPU business, and rather than playing to company's strengths he looked at whatever hot tech was out there.
- worrycue 5y agoThis isn’t the first time Intel has flirted with things outside their core competence. They dabbled with SSDs, mobile phone modems, … etc. It’s just something Intel does. Why? Don’t know.
- bluGill 5y agoAll companies need to flirt with things that might be good. Some of those things will turn out so great that you leave your orignial company behind, while others will be duds that you drop, and still others will be small side businesses that make you a bit of money in down times but otherwise are just barely worth doing. Intel used to be a memory company that flirted with making CPUs. I don't recall when they left the memory business (I think in the 1980s)
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoIntel used to be a RAM company that sold microprocessors as a side business.
- thrashh 5y agoI mean we’ve had Bell Labs et. al. and now we have transistors, Unix, CCDs to allow digital cameras, etc… They can keep on trucking with R&D
- yann2 5y agoThey are big enough to take the loss. No harm in trying.
- joezydeco 5y ago
- kypro 5y agoI tested one of their preproduction LIDAR cameras just before it was released and it was great. Their SR305 was also really good for close-range, high precision applications, but they scraped that model earlier this year. For us it was the SR305 we were interested in as it had the specs we needed at the right price point. We had a meeting with the RealSense team about a year and a half ago and they strongly hinted at the SR305 being EOL soon which made it very hard for us to commit to RealSense for the project we were working on. I'm quite surprised about this news though. Back then they suggested that LIDAR and stereo cameras would be their focus going forward. I can only assume this must be a recent move given what we were told back then and that the L515 is relatively new. Huge shame about their facial auth products too. My understanding is that these are used in quite a few products, but they also use structed light tech so I assume that's why that decision was made. It's worth noting that the L515 isn't replaceable by the D455 in many use cases. The D455 is good, but doesn't have the same kind of range and precision the L515 has. It's depth data is also far nosier, as is often the case with stereo depth cameras.
- spockz 5y agoSo what is this? In this thread and previous threads I read many comments about people being hit by intel dropping the shoe on products that are actually great. Why don’t they capitalise on these great products and actually diversify?
- RC_ITR 5y agoBecause of course every one of (the very few) users is going to complain on HN about a product they use being EOL'ed. An to put it in perspective, Intel's IOT group, which is (lol) mostly Point of Sale and MRI machines, does $3bn of revenue a year. Intel is a big ship, and outside of new platforms (like smartphones were), there are few meaningful ways to diversify. Hell, even if they bought NXP (one of the actual leaders in IOT), that would still only constitute 10% of their revenue.
- randomluck040 5y agoIn our area I think where I work we’re the only ones that have a bunch of those sensors. It’s niche, HN in general is niche so I think they’re not selling millions of their LIDAR sensors. Still for those that rely on them it’s sad.
- michaelt 5y agoBecause the ‘great products’ aren’t selling in large enough volumes to cover the division’s wage bill. And presumably they don’t think selling far fewer at a much higher price would do so either.
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoI have no direct knowledge, but Intel has had a history of struggling in everything but x86, until recently where x86 has struggled. Of course it's management, but there is a particular kind of management that spawns around highly technical, highly profitable industries where engineers originally took the company to prominence. Basically, engineers in management will be displaced by sociopathic MBAs in management that will use machiavellian social isolation combined with financing tricks. In a way this goes back to a classic high school quote: popular people are popular because they spend all their time being popular. Nerds aren't popular because they spend their time learning. So the "cool businesspeople" swoop in, isolate and eject the engineering-focused management with quick fix finance tricks and the usual middle management dirty pool. Meanwhile the engineering-focused managers, invariably doing no-good-deed-goes-unpunished things like good engineering and good-for-the-companey... well, those people's days are numbered. Then it devolves into a two-caste system: the engineers thrown enough money to keep the moneymaker ship on course and flowing, and the management caste partying on the decks. This is not an environment conducive to moving into new markets.
- Causality1 5y agoWhat's the point of winding down departments like this? Spin them off into their own company to sink or swim.
- robocat 5y agoPerhaps it is the same as an acquihire - you give up some money in return for some staff you know the value of.
- IshKebab 5y agoI have a D435 and it is pretty great. Easy to use SDK, high quality depth information, high frame rate. One of the few true USB-3 UVC cameras too. Unfortunately it's really expensive, combined with limited applications and heavy processing requirements I wouldn't be surprised if they discontinue those too.