No contact with APPRO staff

We had a similar experience - TI will not talk to you to support Appro's stuff, but they are happy to advertise it!

Appro seem to have some e-mail problems, like their e-mail is blocked or something. I had to resort to posting here very much as you have, and then someone from Appro replied... eventually they had to use their G-Mail addresses rather than Appro as none of their mails came to us (we still never get updates from them, sometimes we just hear someone mention here that a new version has been made available...)

Thank you very much Bob!!!

Can you tell me what is the G-MAIL to make contact with they?

Also, did you have bought something from them? Is it reliable?

Best regards.

I have e-mailed you a contact.

We bought DM368-IPNC-MT5, the unit works and the SDK is complete but the documentation is not great - the code is mostly without comments, the documentation only really explains how to plug it in & maybe change a few small things, but does not explain the system operation very well, and support from both TI and Appro has been very poor.

Basically your only real option is to ask for help of these forums and hope that someone answers. There are a few TI people/partners posting here, but I think TI does not have anyone whose job it is to help people so you cannot guarantee that anyone will answer.

There seems to be no way to get guaranteed support from TI/Appro, even after spending $1000 on a development kit.

With experience, if I was starting a new project, I would not choose TI again. Unfortunately our project did not allow changing devices.

I'm very close to ordering this evaluation device from Appro and pursuing the DM3x solution, and so this is disturbing to read.

What attracted me to this reference design was the seemingly good documentation, support and user base. If it turns out I'll be left on my own, then the value of the design is highly diminished.

What options would you consider instead if you could start over?

That depends very much on what your requirements are, there's quite a few offerings & variations out there with different features and support.

Sticking with TI (which we would probably avoid in future) the RidgeRun SDK seems quite well supported, the LeopardBoard is basically abandonware (we have used a couple to stand in for the Appro camera to avoid bricking it while developing), the only thing the Appro SDK has over the RidgeRun is it's got ONVIF/PSIA support (which was our reason for choosing it).

Thanks for the insight, much appreciated.

My requirements are pretty mild at the moment, I'm after support for a range of imaging sensors (particularly the WDR Aptina ones), and I'm not too fussed about frame rate or oodles of peripherals. The DM365 is probably a bit overpowered, but I'd like the option to add some image processing in future product iterations.

Above all, I'm after something which is well supported, where I don't have to write a bunch of drivers from scratch, which has some good hardware reference designs, and which can be reliably sourced. Just about any multimedia SoC designed for digital cameras, IP cameras, etc. will be usable. I'm looking at production runs in the 100's to 1000 range, and many manufacturers won't even talk to you at those sorts of scales, a real nightmare. The TI parts seemed good in that department, readily available from plenty of distributors.

Shame about the LeopardBoard, that was my other plan. Still, it's cheap, so I guess worth having just to evaluate.

The Leopardboard is a good evaluation platform, just be aware that they seem to give no support (even their forums are a ghost town) - the RidgeRun SDK can be used on them and that seems like a good option with some support.

We have two Leopardboards for developing on, we bought a camera module from Leopard which it turns out they don't even have drivers for, the best answer so far is "look at our other drivers and roll your own!" which is really frustrating as surely they must have had one running to test it at least.