Changing Perspective Across Industries  

Luxonis was founded in 2019 with a focus on robotic vision. In just a few years, they’ve had an immeasurable impact developing technologies like their OAK cameras that feature on-device artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and computer vision (CV). Their technology has applications in wildlife conservation, automated retail checkout, worker safety, collision prevention, infant monitoring in neonatal ICUs, and reducing pesticides in agriculture—to name a few.  

Luxonis helps their customers build robots of all shapes, sizes, and purposes by effectively handling all the AI vision work for them. The essential components Luxonis designs allows devices to perceive and engage with the world like people would, but with vision that can be even more discerning. Who wouldn’t want clear-as-day night vision or a near-360° stereo view of everything around them?

Altium 365 vastly reduces errors and respins

Bringing the power of robotic visual perception to all who would benefit is a major priority for Luxonis. “Our aim is to make it easy across a variety of industries. We build the firmware all the way to the cloud infrastructure to make it easy for someone to integrate exactly what they need for their robot. And these robots vary tremendously,” said Brandon Gilles, one of the founders of the company. 

Luxonis engineers work across three continents to design and create the PCBs for their products. With the availability of their product being a priority, cost and time to market are top of mind. Altium 365 vastly reduces errors and respins—especially those caused by version control mishaps—which allows them to move forward with much greater confidence and speed. 

Inspiring Collaboration and Consistency Around the Globe With Altium 

In developing their AI vision, Luxonis was faced with two major technological and process challenges. First, they needed to find a tool that would be capable of high-speed design in a dense environment. At the same time, Luxonis also needed to ensure engineering teams distributed around the world could work seamlessly on the most up to date versions of their designs to meet deadlines and stay on track. 

That’s when they looked to Altium Designer^® to help with stackup and impedance calculations; interactive length tuning covered the needs for high speed, HDI designs. They also benefited a lot from manufacturer part search during shortage times.

MCAD CoDesigner allowed for seamless collaboration across teams with a simple SOLIDWORKS^® add-on, taking the manual work out of converting and exchanging files. By using Altium, Luxonis’ PCB designers were able to coordinate with mechanical engineers using SOLIDWORKS across three continents—giving them confidence they are all working from a common set of data on the most up-to-date version. 

While Altium Designer solved efficiency and collaboration challenges, Altium 365^® proved especially useful in reducing errors caused by a lack of version control like working on outdated designs—an issue that often lends to missed deadlines and costly board respins. 

Interactive and contextual commenting directly on the latest designs helped their team communicate more clearly as opposed to using, say, screenshots. This helped reduce risk of errors and kept Luxonis engineers focused on solving design problems without being distracted by non-engineering tasks