In a post a few weeks ago someone asked if "Is RAE dead?" The answer, to me, was ambiguous. I believe I have evidence suggesting that RAE is not supported, and in fact may be dead. I hope someone from Luxonis can clarify the company's expectations with respect to RAE.
What follows is my admittedly circumstantial evidence.
I experimented with an OAK-D during almost all of 2022 and into early 2023. I felt the documentation, sample programs, etc., bordered on great. During that time, I found support in most cases to be timely and close to superb. There was lots of activity from a community of users. That experience gave me confidence I'd see the same with RAE.
I started experimenting with my RAE in October 2023. At the time, I found little documentation, and most of what I found was incomplete. I could get my RAE to do next to nothing. Support was present, but delayed and sometimes unhelpful. Due to other pressing projects, I put RAE on a shelf hoping for maturity.
I started with RAE again in March 2024. Not much had changed overall, but I got a little support and I was able to get enough working that I could see camera output and actually add some logging statements to an app. There seemed to be only handful of RAE users. Somewhere I read that Luxonis had concluded the ROS2 interfaces were too hard for users and was defining a Python SDK to make programming much easier. That sounded attractive, and with other projects waiting, I again put RAE on a shelf hoping for maturity.
I started with RAE the third time in August 2024. Not much had changed overall, but there was a bit of documentation on the SDK, and I was able to get enough help from two folks (one of whom may be from Luxonis) that I got the Car app to work, even in follow-me mode (which as pretty nice). That said, RAE was unreliable (sometimes the app would "hang"), and the SDK documentation was incomplete, including no sample apps and almost nothing about how you actually code, install, run, or debug an SDK-based app.
So, I am to the point of putting RAE on the shelf again. But unless Luxonis plans to make dramatic improvements to documentation and support, it feels meaningless to ever take it off the shelf again.
Can someone from Luxonis address my concerns about support?
Thanks.
