Reliable All-Night Power Setup

Here's our recommended gear to reliably power both your camera and Arsenal through an entire night.

Power Source

Neewer Mini V Mount Battery — While more expensive options exist, we've found these batteries to provide everything necessary. They feature:

• A USB port to power Arsenal.
• An 8-volt output ideal for powering your camera via a dummy battery.
• USB charging capability while in use (more on this below).

Dummy Batteries

You might think dummy batteries are primarily used because Arsenal occupies the camera’s USB port. While that's partially true, dummy batteries are generally much more reliable than USB charging. Many cameras can't charge fast enough via USB to maintain power, especially as temperatures drop overnight. Dummy batteries, on the other hand, offer 100% reliability.

Important note for Nikon users: Third-party dummy batteries typically won’t work reliably for extended timelapses. Nikon cameras perform an internal check and shut down after approximately an hour if a non-Nikon dummy battery is detected. We've only encountered this issue with Nikon cameras; other brands haven't exhibited this behavior. On Sony cameras you'll get a message about the dummy battery being third party, but once you dismiss it, things should work.

We recommend dummy batteries with barrel jacks, which pair seamlessly with the Neewer battery's 8-volt output. Ensure you connect to the 8-volt port—not the 12-volt—to avoid damage.

Dummy batteries that connect via a D-Tap port are also available but can make cable extensions more challenging.

USB-C for Arsenal

To power Arsenal, this Anker 6-foot USB-C to USB-C cable will work fine (or any other charging cable that supports at least 15 watts). Remember, Arsenal can simultaneously charge through one USB-C port and connect to your camera through the other, making your setup clean and straightforward.

Lens/Dew Heaters

Lens or dew heaters are essential for preventing moisture and frost from accumulating on your lens during long, cold nights. The ones we currently use are no longer produced. When selecting your heater, look for models equipped with a thermistor (temperature sensor). These are more power-efficient, drawing less energy when temperatures are warmer. We prefer USB-powered heaters connected via a USB splitter, allowing multiple accessories to run off one power source.

Extending Power for Cold or Extra-Long Nights

On particularly cold or when doing full day-to-night and back-to-day timelapses, we use two Neewer batteries connected in sequence. Simply plug one battery into the other using a USB-A to USB-C cable. Verify the power flow on the battery's display to ensure correct discharging direction. While not the most efficient solution, this method significantly extends your shooting time and flexibility.

Get Out and Capture the Night Sky

Timelapse photography offers an incredible opportunity to witness and capture nature's slow yet stunning transitions—from vibrant sunsets to expansive starlit skies. Grab your gear, head outdoors, and experience the rewarding journey of capturing time unfold before your eyes.

Ready to feel inspired? Watch some of our favorite timelapses in action below and see firsthand what's possible.

Clear skies and happy shooting!

New Cameras

We added support for the following cameras:

• Canon R50
• Canon R100
• Nikon Z50 ii
• Sony A1 ii

We have a few more cameras in the works also that we're hoping to get out later this month.

Improved Panoramas

We made a large improvement to panoramas. The improved stitcher is now able to handle more difficult panoramas (with less overlap or less texture/details in the photos.) Give it a try and let us know your thoughts.

Bug Fixes

iOS:

• Fixed a few app crashes and general stability improvements
• Fixed an issue saving DeepColor photos automatically under Manage Photo Storage

Android:

• Fixed a bug with sharing timelapses on some Android phones
• Fixed a crash on startup
• Fixed a button layout issue on some phones

From The Field

If you haven't heard, mid to late 2025 will be the solar maximum for the sun's 11 year solar cycle. This means higher a higher than usual number of strong aurora's. We were fortunate to catch one in October while visiting the Banff area.

Arsenal Code:

• Fixed a crash with crowd control
• fixed an issue with Night Assist on some phones
• performance improvements
• on newer Sony cameras, there is now an option to not transfer RAW files to Arsenal, which speeds up preview and trigger times. This option can only be used when you don't need DeepColor or syncing RAWs to Arsenal's micro SD card.

iOS:

• The DeepColor slider now spins to give a better indication of when processing is happening
• Added a loading indicator when viewing photos and stacks that have not yet processed
• Fixed a bug that would cause the position of the photos to jump around during photo state changes.
• Fixed a crash when dismissing a modal if a Panorama could not stitch
• Fixed a crash on older Sony cameras when the lens aperture dial was not set to A
• Fixed a regression with external triggering on Timelapses

Android:

• The DeepColor slider now spins to give a better indication of when processing is happening
• Added a loading indicator when viewing photos and stacks that have not yet processed
• Fixed a bug where the drag areas to reorder Holy Grail priority did not always work
• Improved position of arrows pointing to current setting value on Holy Grail
• Improved the dragging experience of Holy Grail ranges.
• Fixed a crash on older Sony cameras when the lens aperture dial was not set to A
• Fixed a regression with external triggering on Timelapses
• Fixed a crash on older Sony cameras when the lens aperture dial was not set to A

Phones should automatically update to the latest app (which then will update the firmware when you first connect)

Expect more releases with performance and bug fixes coming soon. We've also got support for more cameras in the pipeline.

• Ryan

New Cameras

After what seems like a long gap, camera companies seem to be releasing a lot of new cameras this summer.

We just released version 2.0.94 to the iOS and Android app stores. This release adds support for the Sony A6700, Canon R5C (when the camera is on the Photo dial only), and the Nikon Z6iii. We've been working on adding the Fuji X-T5, but it's got some issues we still need to work through to get it supported. (So no guarantees yet we will be able to get it added)

We will also be getting the Canon R5 ii and R1 in as soon as they are available to see if it's possible to add support for them.

Performance Improvements

If you're on a newer Sony camera, you'll now see an option under Settings called "Only Send JPG's to Arsenal when in RAW+JPG". This setting mirrors the "Still Img. Save Dest" setting on those cameras and lets you control what is sent to Arsenal from the app.

While the transfer speed between Arsenal and Sony cameras is quite fast, RAW files are still very large. (Especially on the A7RiV and A7RV.) Unlike Canon and Nikon cameras, we can't pull in the RAW file later, so we have to either pull it in shortly after it's shot or we can't get it at all.

You'll need the RAW file's sent to Arsenal if you want to use DeepColor or save a copy of the RAW files to Arsenal's microSD card slot. Otherwise you can disable the option and everything will be quite a bit faster. Arsenal already disable this option for Timelapses and Panoramas where the RAW download time would significantly hurt the experience. Now you can control if you want it on the rest of the time.

Do note that this setting only applies if you're shooting RAW+JPG, if you do shoot with RAW+JPG, the "Only Send JPG's to Arsenal when in RAW+JPG" setting can really speed everything up on newer Sonys.

Faster Intervals in Timelapse

We frequently get requests for faster intervals during timelapse. I'm happy to say that on Sony, Nikon, and Canon (and hopefully Fuji soon), we can now pull photos at the same time the shots are being taken. This lowers the gap required between taking the photo's quite a bit and lets us achieve shorter intervals.

Quite a few cameras now can hit 2 second intervals. (And a few 1 second)

Holy Grail takes a bit of time to do the AI to predict the next settings, so 1 second intervals are probably best done in Basic mode. (But most newer cameras can hit 2 second intervals in holy grail)

We also fixed an issue where frames may be skipped when shooting really short intervals on some Sony cameras.

Better Messages

We spent some time during this release to add more messages when something unexpected happens. Here's a few places where we improved the messaging.

• If you have a lens with an aperture dial, Arsenal can't change the aperture value if it's not set to 'A' or 'Auto'.
• On Sony's if you're shooting in JPG only and DeepColor can't render due to the lack of RAW file.
• On older Sony's we can't control the PC RAW+J Img Save option, so it's set to only send JPG's to Arsenal, the DeepColor slider area will show an error.

Improved Camera Reset Logic

There were a few cases where the cameras could get into a state where they were waiting for a follow up message from Arsenal (or vice versa) that would not come. Usually due to Arsenal or the camera being disconnected at certain moments. There are a few ways we can reset the camera to start the state machine over again.

Typically these errors would manifest as the camera not connecting after unplugging the cable or restarting the camera. Arsenal should handle these edge cases a lot better now. It may still take a few seconds to reset, but then you should be good to go.

Other fixes

• On some Android phones, users were running into an issue using night assist. This should be fixed.
• On Android, a few of the newer Nikons would format their shutter speeds as 0.001s instead of 1/1000, the formatting will now show in fractions.
• Fixed a rare crash when the iOS app first connected.

We've got more updates in the works. Stay tuned.

2024 is set to be an exciting year. We've got some really interesting new things planned for Arsenal 2. First though, it's time the Android app got some love (see below). We have also added support for the Canon R8 and Canon R10, with more cameras in the works.

Panorama on Android is finally out of Beta!

Thanks to everyone who helped test and get it out the door. Be sure to check out the Getting Started guide for Panorama on Android.

We'll continue to make improvements to Panorama over the next few months as we get more real world feedback. Let us know how pano is working for you and send us some panos you take (help@witharsenal.com)!

Faster Android Live View Renderer

This one has been in the works for a while. High frame rate live view doesn't sound that complicated, but under the hood a lot has to happen to make it work. If you just want the tl;dr, Android can now hit 30 frames per second, and sometimes higher, on most cameras and phones with very little lag. This took a total rewrite of the rendering pipeline and networking pipeline. Thanks to the team for their hard work getting this out the door.

Faster Smart Mode Triggering

When you switch to the smart screen, we start a process that continuously monitors the speed of objects across the frame and the vibration from camera shake. This process needs to be started before you take the photo to get good results. We did quite a bit of work in this release to decrease the time each loop of this process takes. We were able to get some pretty big performance gains (10x in some cases). As an expected side effect, this leaves a lot more compute for smart mode, meaning it's able to get through it's computations much faster (200ms in most cases).

Once we had improved this speed, we went back and started looking at trigger times on the various cameras. We were able to improve trigger times from smart mode on Sony and Canon's. Though there's a bit more work to be done in future releases for Sony.

Longer Battery Life

While we were working on Smart mode, we made a few performance improvements in areas that used quite a bit of Arsenal battery power. Expect longer battery life if you're sitting on the smart screen quite a bit.

Firmware Updates that Don’t Suck

Since 2017 we’ve shipped over 250,000 Arsenal’s (a AI photography assistant for DSLR/mirrorless cameras). Being a small company, we didn’t have the customer support resources to be walking users through the update process. Updates need to work, be fast, and be 100% resilient. Here’s everything we did to get there and some tips for anyone trying to do the same.

Arsenal 1

When building Arsenal 1, we decided to time-box the firmware update “feature”. We had so many things to do, we had to be ok with good enough. Spoiler: It wasn’t until Arsenal 2 that we had the time to get everything right.

What We Needed

I did quite a bit of research and at the time (2017) and there weren’t any good off the shelf solutions that met our requirements. Our perfect update system needed the following:

• designed for linux not microcontrollers (Arsenal runs Linux on an arm processor)
• fault tolerant, no way to brick a unit (surprisingly not something most off the shelf solutions provided)
• updates over wifi (from our mobile app)
• minimal disk overhead (no duplicates of the whole firmware image) fast updates

A Lesson In What Not To Do

The camera industry is the classic example of terrible update experiences. Most cameras require you to navigate a website, find your camera model, download a firmware binary, put it in a specific path on the SD card, insert the SD card in the camera, then update through the camera menu. It’s a struggle for the user, but to be fair, it is simple to engineer and seems resilient.

Sony is probably the worst example of bad updates, instead of the SD card workflow, for most cameras they require you install a custom driver and kernel extension (yes, you read that right) on your Mac/PC to talk to the camera over USB.

With Arsenal we wanted to raise the bar.

Arsenal 1 Firmware Build

We were racing against a deadline to ship Arsenal 1, so moving fast was the top priority. Our embedded/Linux engineer and I brainstormed a few options of how to implement a more production firmware build process. For Arsenal 1, we created a simple build process based on Arch linux and bash scripts.

Our build process involved the following:

• configure and build our Linux kernel and drivers
• install a stock Arch image on the board — along with our custom kernel and drivers
• install our dependencies with pacman and gcc
• remove the build related dependencies
• copy our software to the disk
• image and compress the disk image (The firmware image was just a tar of our disk image)
• The whole thing was glued together with bash scripts. Not the most elegant, but it worked. And more importantly, we got it built quickly.

Disk Overhead and Operation Never Brick

Embedded firmware images are usually really small, so a common technique is to have two partitions on disk. You write the new image to one partition, then flip to it after a successful update. If something goes wrong, you don’t flip.

Our firmware images were huge, so we didn’t have the disk space to dedicate to two copies of everything. Instead we created a very minimal image (using openembedded) that only had the firmware updater, usb/wifi drivers, and an http server to upload to. We called this the “recovery image.”

“Recovery” sat on a small partition at the start of the disk, after that was the root partition for the main firmware image, then a user partition for all user data.

We made the recovery image and root partitions as read only as possible so things like overflowing log files wouldn’t cause boot issues. Storing all user data (in our case image caches) on the user partition meant a full user disk wouldn’t affect the actual boot, and our device code could clear the cache on boot even if we coded something wrong. (Which I assure you never happened, not even once)

This kind of defensive design saved us a few times. Just assume you will screw something up at some point and try to design a firmware update process that can handle some screw ups.

Handling Screw Ups

Even with the precautions on the main firmware/root partition, I knew mistakes would be made. So we needed to be able to handle a failed start on the root partition. Either from a bad disk write, corrupted bits, or the software getting into a bad state (from a bug), we needed failed boots of the root partition to be recoverable.

Automatic Failover

The recovery image was very small and targeted, so we decided if something went wrong with the root firmware boot, we would fail over to the recovery partition. From there you could re-upload the firmware image and be on your way again. To be safe, recovery updates clear the user partition, but Arsenal has very little on device state, so for users it’s not an issue.

You might wonder how you can be sure the device will flip over to recovery if something like a bad disk write happens. This is where hardware watchdog’s come in. The hardware watchdog’s are set up by uboot, after the root partition boots (takes about 6 seconds to boot), then our software has 30 seconds to disable the watchdog. If the watchdog isn’t disabled in 30 seconds, the unit will reboot. After 3 failed boots, it kicks over to recovery. (Check your processors data sheet for details on how to set up these watchdogs)

Simple but effective. From the mobile app, we can treat recovery updates the same way as normal updates.

The important thing with hardware watchdogs is that they are implemented in hardware (funny how that works). No amount of software mistakes (except accidentally disabling the watchdog) will prevent the reboot. Only the happy path in our case prevents Arsenal from entering recovery.

Recovering Recovery

Ok, so what happens if the recovery image gets corrupted? Our recovery image is about 10MB’s, so we just did the obvious thing and added a 2nd copy of the recovery image, again with a watchdog to fail over and boot the 2nd image. These images are actually files on the recovery partition which uboot mounts as a read only file system.

I don’t have any metrics on how many times having the 2nd copy of recovery has saved us. Data on the frequency of cosmic ray induced bit-flips and some napkin math says it has happened. We have yet to get back a unit that wouldn’t boot into recovery.

Version Locking

As a user, you mostly access Arsenal via a mobile app. To simplify things, I decided early that the mobile app should only connect if the device firmware version matched the mobile app version. (Otherwise you go from a single app/device version that needs to testing to a matrix of version combinations to test)

On Arsenal 1, when the mobile app updated (which happens automatically on phones), the mobile app would see the versions didn’t match and require you to download and install the firmware update to continue. The process was fairly smooth, though automatically disconnecting and reconnecting wifi required a ton of debugging work and Wifi driver fixes (especially to deal with Android)

ASIDE — HERE BE DRAGONS WARNING: even today, Android’s wifi stacks are really up to the phone manufacturer and the quality of drivers and even implementation of the core Android Wifi API’s is very poor. If you need automatic Wifi connections to a device from Android, be prepared for a lot of pain as you purchase and debug issues with the way your wifi chips drivers communicate to any of the 30,000+ unique Android phones.

The Missing Requirements

Arsenal 1’s firmware update process had a huge flaw which you may have seen already. If your mobile app updated (as happens in the background), and you weren’t on internet when you opened the new version, you couldn’t download the firmware and connect. Our firmware images were 500MB’s, so you needed a good internet connection and possibly a free data plan. Even if you were on Wifi or had cell, waiting for the update to download while the good light was fading made for unhappy users. (DJI and GoPro had the same issue in their apps at the time)

This turned out to be a much harder problem to fix than you might think. In a perfect world, we would have blocked automatic app updates for our app, but that’s not an option.

For Arsenal 2, we added two more requirements for our firmware updater.

• either have offline update support or allow non-matched version connections
• updates in less than 2 minutes start to finish (“door to door” as we call it, the time from pressing update until you’re connected to the updated Arsenal)

Arsenal 2

Offline Updates

The <2 minute update requirement seemed like an impossible hurtle. Arsenal 1 updates took about 8 minutes. (ugh) To get to <2, we would need to rebuild every part of the system, but we’ll come back to that.

First we debated if we could somehow handle the testing of unmatched mobile and device code versions. We thought about just supporting connections from 5 versions back, then requiring an update if it was older. This would still mean 5² = 25 combinations to test on each release. (And multiply that by the 100+ cameras we support) QA already took weeks, so I nixed that idea pretty quickly.

Our only option was embedding the firmware in the app itself. When we built Arsenal 1, the amount of available storage on phones (especially iPhones) was really limited, users told us a 550MB app was a non-starter. So we opted to download the firmware image when you needed it.

A lot had changed by Arsenal 2 (2020). I checked my phone, I had 4 apps all taking up more than 500MB. I had honestly never noticed. Users were still telling me that 500MB was too big, but I decided we would try embedding the firmware and see how many complaints we got.

Our #1 complaint on Arsenal 1 was blocked connections when a firmware update was needed and you were offline, so we didn’t have a ton to lose.

Shrinking the Firmware

I never liked the firmware build process for Arsenal 1. I had managed to integrate it into our CI pipeline, but it ran on a physical unit that booted into a DFU type mode. We needed to send a special sequence to a pin on the board to get it into the DFU mode, so we wired an FTDI controller to the pin and flipped its GPIO pin to send the sequence. (#hacky)

For Arsenal 2, firmware/software builds needed to be:

• faster (Arsenal 1 builds took hours)
• repeatable (Arsenal 1 builds were downloading things from pacman and github during the build, not good)
• more compact, the Arsenal 1 image was 500MB, about 250MB of that was machine learning models, the rest was mostly Arch linux and the rest of the binary dependencies.

Our linux/embedded engineer had worked with yocto and openembedded before. These projects let you build a custom linux distribution with exactly the things you need (and nothing you don’t.) They can even strip out unused symbols from binaries and do some other space optimization tricks.

They are really powerful, but not for the faint of heart. If it had just been me, I would opt for something like buildroot. The great thing about all of these projects is that they cross compile every package, so you can run the build (in parallel) on a large machine. My physically massive — 64 core, 256GB machine learning machine would do fine.

Also, my favorite thing about openembedded is that there’s some container/chroot jail type stuff that happens during the build, and inside of that is a fake sudo type command that’s named pseudo Best name ever.

It took our embedded engineer a few months to get everything moved over, but once we did we ended up with a firmware image that was <50MB with all of our dependencies. A 5x space savings, not bad. There was still an additional 250MB for the machine learning models. The smaller image made for a 2x faster boot. And lastly, openembedded brought our build time down to about 10 minutes.

Compressing the hell out of it

The challenge with Arsenal 2 was that we had both a Standard and a Pro version. The Pro version ran a different Arm architecture than Standard, so we would need to embed both firmware images into the mobile app.

We were looking at about 300MB per firmware image with gzip compression.

Faster Install Times

The 300MB of firmware image would upload in about 45 seconds, so that gave us one minute, 30 seconds to install the firmware and reboot. With gzip compression, the install time was … 5 minutes … I benchmarked the disk and figured out the bottleneck was decompression performance. Moving to parallel gzip decoding improved things, but not enough.

I spent a day building a script to test every compression format I thought might work well on our hardware. (I tried gzip, bzip, deflate, snappy, zstd, and blosc) The tl;dr is zstd won, the compression times were much longer, but all that mattered for us was the decompression times and compression ratio. Zstd’s decompression uses SIMD instructions on ARM and decompression time doesn’t increase as compression level goes up.

Zstd took our 300MB image with light gzip compression to a 220MB image with very high zstd compression.

The smaller image and parallel decoding got our install time down to 1 minute, and the smaller image shaved the upload time down to about 30 seconds. Disabling TCP-slow start for the firmware upload connection got it the rest of the way there.

After months of work, we had a firmware update that took 1 minute, 30 seconds from when you push the update button to when you’re reconnected on the new version.

The Moment of Truth

We had sent out a few hundred Arsenal 2’s to some early testers. The first version had the old Arsenal 1 installer. When it was ready, we pushed the new app version with the new installer. Then we waited…

I knew that embedding the firmware was our best option, so I was ready to defend why we had to make the app 500MB’s.

The messages started coming in, but not the messages I thought. It was all positive feedback about how fast the update process was. To this day, the number of complaints about app size is probably less than 10. (I’m not sure this would have been the case in 2017, but since the app downloads in the background, most people never even look at the size.)

Summary

Firmware updates are a seldom discussed area of building hardware products, the quality of your update process can have a huge impact on how your product is received. Here’s what worked for us:

• openembedded for building firmware/disk images
• zstd for fast decoding and high compression on ARM hardware
• embed the images into the mobile app
• recovery images and hardware watchdog’s for safety

If you’re about to build or integrate an existing firmware update solution, my one piece of advice is to be sure to allocate enough dev time. Firmware updates can seem like something easy form the outside, but once you dive in there’s complexity hiding under every corner. Be sure to program defensively and make sure your system can handle shipping a main image that will fail to boot under some condition.

-- Ryan

We just deployed a new iOS and Android release with a bunch of great updates. First, we added support for five new cameras. The Sony A7R V, Canon R6ii, Canon R7, Nikon Z8, and Nikon Z9. Thanks to everyone who helped test on these cameras to get them out the door.

This release also makes some major improvements to handheld mode. In addition to some bug fixes for handheld mode, we’ve improved performance and settings calculation. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

We made some performance improvements to the Android app and brought it up to the latest on all of its dependencies. There were a few bug fixes related to firmware updates from recovery mode, live view flicker, and syncing photos to your phone. The Android app is getting a lot of love lately, so expect more releases soon.

On the iOS side, we had a few minor bug fixes and tracked down one rare crash. We also fixed a bug with shutter speed formatting on some cameras.

For those of you waiting for units, the latest production run is currently shipping. Everyone that has ordered before today should have their units shipped the first week of August. The next run won’t come in until later this year, but again, any orders before today will go out in the next few weeks.

Thanks,
Ryan

I wanted to provide a quick update on our latest Arsenal 2 production run, so let’s jump into it.

If you’re waiting for a unit from our latest production run, we had a few delays in receiving parts, but we now have 98% of the parts necessary to complete a production run (for both Arsenal 2 and Arsenal 2 Pro). There are a few components we’re still waiting on, but we are expecting them to arrive in the next two weeks (based on commitments from the suppliers).

Some parts we have a portion of the total demand needed to fulfill pre-orders, but we’re not going to wait for the whole batch to begin manufacturing. That means we can begin shipping sooner (see below), and we’ll still finish manufacturing in May as the remaining parts come in. As this is our third Arsenal 2 manufacturing run (and all with the same manufacturer), we’re expecting a smooth process and continued high quality manufacturing.

Given the above manufacturing timeline, Arsenal 2s will begin shipping in May as expected. We’ll start by shipping the earliest pre-orders first. We expect to complete most shipping in May, with some more recent orders shipping in June. We will send out an email with tracking info once your order has been shipped.

New Cameras

Ben, one of our software engineers, is finalizing adding support for the following cameras: Sony A7RV, Canon R7, Canon R6ii, Nikon Z9. We expect those to launch in May. If you want to change your camera cable to support one of those cameras, email help@witharsenal.com.

Looking for a different camera we don’t currently support? Be sure to vote on any cameras you want added here: https://witharsenal.com/unsupported-camera. The feedback helps us prioritize our development efforts and is greatly appreciated.

Thanks everyone for your continued support.

• Ryan

Panorama is in the iOS App Store!

We’re excited to launch Panorama, and have updates on that and more below, so let’s jump in.

Panorama

Panorama is probably the most involved feature we’ve shipped. Thanks to everyone on the team for all of the hard work getting the iOS version out the door. As is not uncommon, the last 10% takes half the time. Let us know how panorama is working for you, and send us some panos you take (help@witharsenal.com)!

Panorama Tips

By popular request, here’s some tips for nailing panoramas with Arsenal 2.

Tip #1: Stop Down

While panorama stitching software has come a long way, it relies on finding matching details between photos to align images into the final photo. If you have objects close to the lens, be sure to increase your aperture so as much of the scene is in focus as possible. When focusing, I recommend choosing a focal point a third to half way between the foreground and background. While you can change your focus part way through a panorama, most of the time you want to find a single focus point that captures everything.

Tip #2: Watch out for Polarizers

While polarizing filters are great to bring out color in the sky or foliage, when shooting really wide panoramas, they can introduce a strong gradient in the sky. While this rule applies to wide angle lenses as well, it’s much easier to use a polarizer when shooting a panorama than on the front of extremely wide angle lenses.

Tip #3: Level your tripod

Actually setting up a tripod for a solid pano is a little more involved than usual because depending on what kind of tripod you have, you’ll need to make sure that both your tripod and head are level. Arsenal’s Pano stitching software can deal with some rotation between images, but it’s more likely to match if the rotation is minimal.

Tip #4: Nodal Point

If you have objects close to the lens in your panorama, finding the nodal point can ensure everything is able to stitch. A nodal point is the point where light rays intersect and invert as they come through the front of the lens and are projected back to the sensor. This point is somewhere in the middle of the lens and it’s different for every focal length you use, even within the same zoom lens.

Lucian put together a quick video to explain how to find the nodal point.

Tip #5: Useful for more than just huge prints

Panoramas can be a powerful tool and not just for high megapixel prints. I find there’s a lot of situations where a 3 or 4 shot panorama lets me get that extra width I need and lets me leave the ultrawide lens at home.

Tip 6: Overlap

The amount of overlap you need between photos depends on the amount of detail in the individual photos. Arsenal’s Pano feature tries to find the same points in each photo and requires enough overlapping points to calculate the geometric transforms to align everything.

In most cases, I recommend at least 30% overlap, but if you have parts of the scene without a lot of small details, you may need more. Also, don’t forget to overlap your rows if you’re doing a multirow pano. And again, make sure the overlapping portions contain some details. When working with blue skies that have little to no detail, it can be helpful to turn your camera vertical so the sky photos still have some of the ground in them that can be used to align.

Panorama on Android

We’ve still got some work to do to get the Android version of Panorama out the door. My original prototype panorama code did most of the real time stitching on the device side. While this worked, it needed to send down a full stitch for every frame. This caused some performance issues if you had a slow wifi connection (due to lots of other wifi devices in the area). We decided to move the stitching (both the final image and the preview) to the phone. This meant we only had to send down photos/live view frames as they came in. The big win was most phones have more RAM available, so there was less swapping to flash memory, which also improved live view stitch speeds. The tl;dr is it was a faster experience in most cases.

The downside to moving to processing on the phones is it complicates our build/development process a bit. The iOS version is in the App Store today, but we’ve still got some work to get Pano out on the Android side (more variants of phones, so it’s more work than on the iOS side). We’re making good progress, a lot of the code is getting reused from the iOS side, but there’s still UI work and build work to do. We’ll keep you updated as we go.

Bug Fixes

There were some bugs with Night Assist on iOS that Ben was kind enough to dive in on and fix (mostly related to focusing position). While the Milky Way is currently below the horizon most of the night, I’m looking forward to using the improvements in the spring.

New Cameras

We’re getting a lot of requests for new cameras lately, mostly related to the fall camera releases but also a few from earlier in the year. We’re in the process of trying to add support for the following cameras: Sony A7RV, Canon R7, Canon R6ii, Nikon Z9. We can’t guarantee we’ll add these yet, so please hold off on ordering extra cables or only for those cameras. We’ll announce here on Kickstarter and on social media when we’ve confirmed support for these or other cameras.

Also, be sure to vote on any cameras you want added here: https://witharsenal.com/unsupported-camera. It really helps us prioritize our roadmap.

Thanks everyone for your continued support, and I hope everyone has a great holiday season.

• Ryan

It’s been a busy handful of weeks for us here at Arsenal, and we have some good news to share, so let’s jump right in.

Panorama Stitching

I won’t bury the lead here: Pano is on track to go to BETA on iOS later next week! Android should follow later in October. We had some summer setbacks from the Dev side that prevented us from getting this out sooner, but the last two months we’ve made a ton of progress. I was out doing my own testing in Glacier National Park this past week and I’m very excited about Pano. The UI is smooth and the results are just great; it’s what I envisioned when we added it to the roadmap. Thanks to Ben for all of the hard work getting the final cropping and projection UI in. As far as we know, this is the first way to do real time Panoramas on DSLR/mirrorless cameras.

As far as launch, we’re looking at mid-to-late October to be fully productionalized and released to the general public (for iOS). This also allows for some time for BETA feedback and to squash any bugs we find. You’ll see a new Arsenal 2 app update when it’s ready.

Below is a quick demo of the pano and the cropping/projection interface (it was pretty rainy today, so please forgive the flat light). I’ll probably do a follow up post next month with some details on the technical issues we needed to solve to get it productionized. It’s fairly easy to use, just make sure you have enough overlap between your photos. Then press done and you can choose your final projection and crop. The level option can be enabled to fix bending horizons. If you decide you want to start over, hit Done, then the Delete icon.

Apple iOS 16

Apple released iOS 16 earlier this month. Fortunately it didn’t impact Arsenal 2 at all, so the usual September release to support Apple’s new update wasn’t needed. Thanks to our Dev and Support teams, and some customers that were on the iOS 16 BETA, for all of the testing they did to ensure there were no issues.

Raw Stackers

While we had some good news on Pano, Raw stackers are a bit behind our projected release date. We hit another snag late in testing there, and while some of our team worked on that the rest focused on Pano to ensure we could get that out on schedule. RAW stackers is a pretty big project and more complex than it sounds (I went into some details on this two updates ago). Once the RAW Stackers are finished, you'll have the option to save DNG files for the stacks we render and you'll be able to apply Deep Color to the stacked image.

We’re still working through the details on RAW Stackers, and I don’t want to provide a revised timeline until we’ve gone through it. I’d hope we can BETA in October, but until we solve the issue we’re stuck on I can’t commit to a date. Regardless, I’ll provide an update in October on where we are.

Powerbanks

Freight shipments have finally come down in price (via Ocean, Air is still more expensive), and we’re able to start shipping more overseas. This means we can ship the Powerbanks to our local fulfillment centers and ultimately those customers that ordered*. The Powerbanks are getting on a boat this week. They’ll hit our fulfillment centers in late October, and we’ll ship them out in November. We’ll send it to the same address we used for your Arsenal 2. If your shipping address hasn’t changed you don’t need to do anything; if your address has changed, please email help@witharsenal.com.

*We’ll be starting shipping the Powerbanks to U.S. customers in the lower 48 states and Canada. Shipments to other parts of the world, most notably Australia and Europe, are still much more expensive than pre-COVID given additional costs for packages with lithium ion batteries. We’ll continue to evaluate prices in those parts of the world and ship out as soon as we can.

New Cameras

September is usually the month for new camera announcements, but it looks like most announcement events have been pushed back to October. We’ll be watching announcements closely and deciding on what cameras to support as they are announced. Be sure to vote on which cameras we should add here! We consider votes from those interested, expected demand, and complexity of adding the new camera when deciding if we’ll add support to Arsenal 2.

Wrap Up

I’ll be back with another update in October. If you want to join the Arsenal 2 BETA team and test releases before they go public (including the Pano release), drop us an email (help@witharsenal.com). Thank you for all of your support, and thanks to our team for their continued hard work to continue improving Arsenal 2.

• Ryan

P.S. Some images from the Arsenal archives.

Hey everyone, Ryan here.

I know it's been a bit quiet from us lately, but don’t worry, we’re still here and working (and we all took some PTO after the launch push). We’ve put out a significant app upgrade since our last Update, and are still working behind the scenes to improve Arsenal 2 and deliver more features.

Also, it’s been really great to see all of the images and timelapses Arsenal 2 users are taking. We’ve also seen some pretty creative uses of Arsenal 2 that we hadn’t anticipated, and that’s both interesting and challenges us to think about how we develop Arsenal 2 in the future. If you have an image or timelapse you want to show off, we’d love it if you tag @witharsenal on Instagram/Twitter.

Without further adieu, I wanted to update everyone on what we’ve been working on and where we are, as well as some Tips and Tricks for Arsenal 2, so let’s jump into some updates.

Tips and Tricks

I’ve gotten the chance to chat with a lot of Arsenal users lately (a few I ran into in the field, which is always cool to see). After chatting with some of you, I wanted to share a few tips and tricks that may not be common knowledge:

1) Turn live-view off to access camera menus.

For reasons I don’t think anyone fully understands, a lot of cameras lock the menus on the camera while live-view is on. You can toggle the live view button in the top right to get menu access back while using Arsenal 2.

2) Use the disconnect button to save battery

In the settings menu there is a “Disconnect” button that will drop the wifi connection to the Arsenal 2. Using this button will lower Arsenal 2’s battery usage while disconnected. This is something I do quite a bit when running long timelapses.

3) Lower the camera to review photos in handheld mode

By putting the camera in Aperture Priority and holding the Arsenal 2 power button down for 3 seconds, you can enter handheld mode. Handheld mode continuously updates settings on the camera, letting Arsenal 2 manage settings for you. One trick many people miss is that you can tip the camera down towards the ground to review photos or access camera menus.

Once Arsenal 2 detects the camera pointing at the ground, it will pause updating settings, allowing you to review and change camera settings (again, why the camera block menus while updates are happening is beyond me).

4) Mount Arsenal 2 backwards for extreme long distance selfies

Due to the way antenna designs have to work in such a small enclosure, the wifi range on Arsenal 2 is a bit better when you’re behind it than in-front of it. If your goal is a really long distance selfie, you can reverse Arsenal 2 on the camera and connect the USB to the other side (both sides can charge and connect to cameras in A2).

What We’ve Been Working On

LED battery Check

If you didn't notice, in the latest release, checking how charged your Arsenal 2 is by holding down the power button (when off) is much faster. Thanks to Jack for all of the hard work getting this working. This check happens early during the boot, and at least for me is super useful when grabbing an Arsenal 2 to stick in my bag.

Outdated Wifi Channel Databases/International Travel

We’ve had a long standing issue that we were finally able to track down thanks to some help from a few customers. The issue is related to using 5ghz wifi spectrum in a few countries (Japan mostly). Most of these countries added new 5ghz channels in the last few years. iOS and almost all Android phones handle these new channels fine, but a few Android models in these countries won’t connect to certain 5ghz channels. We think two things have to go wrong for them not to connect. 1) The phone has to have an outdated channel list, and 2) The phone has to enforce what it sees as an invalid channel from a regulatory point of view (normally this is the responsibility of the access point, so the other phones are fine not enforcing it).

Out of the box, Arsenal 2 starts on 2.4ghz, then switches to 5ghz if the current country (based on the phone's country code) allows 5ghz. If the phone’s country code changes (due to travel) to a country that doesn’t allow 5ghz, it will switch back to 2.4ghz. Regulatory rules vary, but everywhere we’ve seen allows this kind of switch provided it doesn’t stay in 5ghz (at this point only a few countries don’t allow 5ghz for Wifi).

So this led to another bug where if you are running one of the Android phones that enforces the 5ghz regulation, it won’t do the initial connection to switch to 2.4ghz. We solved both of these issues by adding a manual option to switch to 2.4 in the settings menu.

VPN Detection

An issue some customers were seeing on the iOS side was a VPN blocking connection to Arsenal 2. Ben put in a lot of work to figure out a way to detect if VPNs are enabled, and now the app will let you know you need to add Arsenal 2 to the bypass list.

Panorama and Raw Stackers

The Arsenal team and I are still working to get Panorama and Raw Stackers out the door. Unfortunately, we've had a few non-feature things we've had to work on lately to get the next build out. We were using a few APIs on Android that were deprecated, so we've had to put in quite a bit of time to move things to the latest version (I started working on Arsenal in 2016, and this kind of work is unfortunately par for the course when your codebase has been around for this long). We also lost a few longtime staff recently, which did set things back a bit as we’ve had to transfer knowledge and cover different areas with a smaller team. Fear not though, we're picking up where they left off.

As far as when we expect these to launch, Raw Stackers is a bit closer than Panorama. We expect Raw Stackers to be tested in BETA later in August. Panorama has a bit more work to do, but should be in BETA in September. I know these timelines are later than everyone had hoped. That said, I think we have a clear runway now to meet the revised targets.

Wrap Up

I’ve had some time to reflect on Arsenal lately, and the more I did the more I realized how proud I am of what the Arsenal team has accomplished. From breaking our own record as the largest Kickstarter for camera electronics, to overcoming a mountain of obstacles we had no control over (COVID, supply chain, trade wars, etc.), to delivering a great product and a successful launch, we’ve really come a long way. And we did it all with a much smaller, close-knit team than I think anyone else could have. I know for a fact that a larger organization would have at least tripled the number of people on Arsenal 2, and that we got it done is a testament to our hardworking team.

We know we still have a few things to wrap up, and we will, but I’m so happy with how Arsenal 2 turned out. And that’s true in the photos we see and the feedback we get from you all. Thanks again to all of you for helping us start this journey, and thanks to our incredible team for making it a reality.

• Ryan

P.S. Some images shot with Arsenal 2 from the archives!

It’s been a busy last month as we finished shipping and continue to improve Arsenal 2. So let’s jump right in to some updates.

What We’ve Been Working On

The team and I have spent most of the past few months working through the remaining Arsenal 2 bugs. Arsenal 2 got a ton more internal testing than Arsenal 1 before it rolled out, and the team did a great job getting through most of the issues before shipping. That said, in a project like this you can’t catch everything and we’ve been focused on making improvements as we see your feedback.

The challenge with Arsenal is what we call the setup permutations. Basically there’s a lot (I mean A LOT) of possible variants of the setups people run Arsenal with.

Arsenal variants = Camera Model * Camera Settings * Lens * Phone Model * Phone OS * Camera firmware

This makes catching every edge case before shipping nearly impossible, especially for a small team like ours. We learned a lot in Arsenal 1, and built better tools for helping us debug any issues users ran into (like the Report a Problem button in the iOS app, that sends us a whole bunch of diagnostics).

Between the start of rolling out Arsenal 2 and now, the dev team has spent most of their time fixing bugs. Software projects tend to have a long tail of issues that take some time to work through. Today we started the roll out of version 2.0.32, which fixes most of the remaining issues (see below for more info.) If your phone hasn’t updated yet, you can get the latest by going here for iOS, or here for Android.

Currently we have around 50 unresolved tickets, many of which we think are fixed in this release. There’s probably at least another month of bug work on our end, but the number of outstanding tickets is quickly approaching zero. Also, the tickets we do see are impacting fewer and fewer users. I’m sure as time goes on we’ll get more in, but we think we’re where we can go back to focusing on getting Panorama and Raw Stackers out the door.

Here’s a few of the things we’ve worked through in the past few months.

Camera Power Draw

A lot of cameras have a way to charge over USB(while Arsenal 2 is controlling the camera). We designed Arsenal 2 to be able to charge the camera over USB. When connected to a camera over USB-C (on A2 Pro), Arsenal specifies the amount of power it can deliver (via a USB-PD negotiation). Unfortunately, a few months ago we realized that some cameras (Fuji’s mostly) were ignoring the spec and pulling a lot more power than Arsenal 2 could deliver when Arsenal 2 isn’t plugged in to USB power itself. This high draw caused Arsenal 2’s battery to drain really quickly (because of excess heat), and in some cases would cause Arsenal 2 to shut down.

Solving this issue took some clever engineering on our dev and embedded team’s part. Some of the cameras required Arsenal 2 to change its PD packets to get the camera to request the right amount, and on a few cameras we’ve designed a system that keeps the camera in a state where it isn’t requesting power. This works in most cases, and for the times it doesn’t (when a few cameras are off, they draw a lot of power), the Arsenal 2 app will now warn you about excessive power draw.

This issue got missed in our testing because we usually test with USB connected to Arsenal 2 (lesson learned.) Thanks to the Arsenal team for the hard work in this one, it took a deep dive to track this one down.

Nikon AF-F Focus

On some Nikons there’s an AF-F (full time) focus mode that is only available in live view. This focus mode–if set–would return an error during tap to focus. Canon cameras had a similar issue, but instead of returning an error, they simply return a different value indicating that focus was successful. This release handles both of these scenarios and prevents false “failed to focus” negatives that a few people were seeing.

Minor Bug Fixes

Here’s the full list of changes in the latest release.

• Fixed an issue on the Fuji XPro2 that would show tap to focus consistently failing
• Fixed an issue on several Canon and Nikon cameras where tap to focus would fail if specific live view focus settings were enabled
• Added an alert to the connection screen when a connected camera (or other device) is charging from Arsenal’s USB port
• Added a similar alert to settings for cameras that have a setting option to disable USB power delivery
• For the Fuji XT-3, XT-2, and XH-1 (these cameras don’t have the option to disable USB power delivery), we implemented a workaround that reduces the amount of power they draw from Arsenal
• Improved performance of memory intensive tasks
• Improved Wi-Fi stability in certain conditions
• Fixed a Sony issue where connecting the camera or triggering a smart mode shot would fail when the camera was in Intelligent Auto Mode
• Fixed an occasional Smart Mode crash
• Optimized performance around the Save to Card settings
• Improved performance around mode changes on several cameras

What’s Next

As mentioned above, the team and I have been pretty heads down working on the rollout and bug fixes. We had hoped to have Panorama and RAW Stackers (stacking RAW outputs from Arsenal 2, not just JPEGs) out before we shipped, but the bug fixes had to take priority. We’re just now starting to get some time to get those out the door.

RAW Stackers

The RAW Stackers are a pretty big project we’ve been working on for what seems like forever. Once the RAW Stackers are finished, you'll have the option to save DNG files for the stacks we render and you'll be able to apply Deep Color to the stacked image.

The big challenge is Arsenal 2 doesn’t have enough RAM to just load a stack of RAW photos into memory at once. So we have to create our own RAW decoders that stream tiles of the image through our stacker pipeline. This is a pretty big task that’s taken a ton of development hours. A lot of the time has been spent building our own RAW decoders that can stream parts of the image, instead of decoding it all at once.

The stackers themselves all operate in 16 or 32-bit, depending on the number of images, so there was a lot of work to make it all fasthe streaming helps quite a bit since parts of the image can stay in higher level caches). We’ve got a really good pipeline now that can stream the stacked photos through our own raw decoding pipeline, and through to Deep Color as well.

RAW Stackers are really close, we’re finishing getting CR3 and RAF support. There’s a few UI changes we need to get in also. We’re hopeful we can have RAW Stackers out sometime in May, assuming the bug load doesn’t increase much.

Panorama

Now that we’ve made it through most of the release work, we’re circling back to the Panorama feature. It’s been a lot more work than we originally expected to get Panorama out the door, but we hope to start BETA testing it in the next month. We’ll keep you posted as we go.

HEIF Support

A few newer cameras support shooting in HEIF format. We’re hoping to have HEIF support integrated in the next release. One issue you see on some cameras is if shooting in HEIF (for JPEG’s), the RAW files will have their previews in HEIF format as well. We have a HEIF decoder up and working and at this point we just need to tie it into the asset processing system.

Multi-Card Fixes

There are some bugs at the moment if you are saving JPEG’s to one card and RAW files to the other. The main issue is on some cameras, the files end up with different names and our system was designed expecting the JPEG and RAW files to have the same name. We hope to have this in the next release as well.

Wrap Up

First off, I want to thank our incredible backer community for their support. We couldn’t be here without you. Perhaps most notably, your support and understanding during COVID-19. Launching Arsenal 2 during a pandemic, and ensuing massive disruptions to supply chain and logistics, proved even more challenging than anyone could have anticipated. I know everyone wanted their Arsenal 2 sooner, but by and large the community was very supportive and understanding as we dealt with these challenges. Thank you.

Second, I’d like to thank the Arsenal 2 team. The monumental task of developing, manufacturing, testing, and shipping Arsenal 2 alone is worthy of thanks, let alone with the small team we have. And then COVID-19 was thrown in for good measure. The team constantly was finding ways to minimize (or avoid) impact to quality or the schedule as challenges arose, most of which were outside of our control during the pandemic. I’m proud of the team’s accomplishments during these difficult times.

We're seeing a lot of great images being created with Arsenal 2 and can't wait to see what you shoot next. Thanks again for all your support!

• Ryan

A quick mini-update on shipping and getting started with Arsenal 2.

Shipping Status

United States:

Complete for orders placed before February 20th.

U.S. orders from February 20th to March 6th will go out the week of March 7th. All other U.S. orders have been shipped. If for some reason yours hasn't, please email help@witharsenal.com.

Canada:

90% completed. The remaining Canadaian pre-orders will go out the week of March 7th.

Asia/Australia/Other Regions:

80% completed. The remaining pre-orders for this region will go out by the week of March 7th. Note that some orders had exceptions with the address provided and we have reached out to some of you to correct some information.

Europe:

Shipping has started for the EU/UK and most of the shipments will complete the week of March 7th. About 20% will go out the week of March 14th.

Getting Started

If you haven’t received your Arsenal 2 yet, I strongly encourage you to go to https://witharsenal.com/a2 when you receive it. In addition to the general setup instructions, the camera brand/model specific instructions are highly recommended.

Most often when a backer has an issue out of the box, it’s due to a camera setting that Arsenal 2 can’t change (and sometimes even see) on its own. The symptoms of having even just one setting off can be quite impactful and can include not being able to connect to Arsenal 2 or trigger a shot. We strongly encourage backers to look at the recommendations in our setup articles before beginning.

In the next Update I’ll share some more news about Arsenal 2’s technology, bugs we’ve squashed, and features we’re testing. Thanks for all of your support!

• Ryan

As I mentioned in my last Update, I wanted to post a quick, weekly mini-Update on shipping progress.

Shipping Status

United States:

All SKUs/USB Cable types are in our warehouse and we’ve been shipping 1,000+ Arsenal 2s (Standard + Pro) per day recently. We brought in some outside help to assist with the volume and it’s been going very well - our delivery rates are very high (>99.5%) and some are even reaching customers the same day.

Our goal was to complete shipping of U.S. orders by February 25th, and we remain on track for that goal.

Also, as I mentioned in my last Update, Fuji USB-C cameras we had held off shipping given some early feedback from backers. We’ve squashed most of those bugs, are working on one last one that’s taking a while (an issue with Deep Color debayering), and we’ve now begun shipping all remaining Fuji camera orders..

Canada:

We’ve shipped over 1,000 units to Canada so far and remain on track to hit our March 3 goal.

Asia/Australia/Other Regions:

We continue to ship to these regions via our Hong Kong fulfillment partner. The Hong Kong COVID spike continues to be a challenge and impact how many units we can ship each day. We are getting some units out each day, but often our batches of Arsenal 2s aren’t completed until 1-3 days later than usual. Given that, I’m going to push the final shipping date from February 25 to March 4 here. Most of you should get a notice by February 25, but I want to ensure we can hit the end date for everyone.

Europe:

As I mentioned in our last Update we expected Arsenal 2s to clear Customs and begin moving to our fulfillment center partners on February 16 (yesterday). That did indeed happen! It’s exciting news to see these Arsenal 2s moving again.

Our goal from the last update was a March 4 completion for shipping Europe orders, and we remain on track to hit that goal. European orders will begin shipping next week.

I’ll be back next week with another mini-Update on shipping. Thanks for all of your support!

• Ryan

We’ve been heads-down focused on launch the last three weeks, but I wanted to follow up with another (quicker than usual) update. So let’s jump in.

Shipping Status

So far, we’ve shipped over half of the Arsenal 2 units to our Kickstarter backers (Standard + Pro). While that’s strong progress, we’re not exactly where we wanted to be. I’ll break down where we are for each region below.

United States:

As I mentioned in the last update we were waiting for a number of cable types (SKUs) to be released from the air freight container yard in Seattle. Fortunately, those have been released, though not as quickly as we hoped and it happened in two batches (instead of one as we expected). The first batch is at our Bozeman warehouse and the remainder will arrive next week.

Based on the above, we expect all U.S. pre-orders to ship by February 25th.

Canada:

The U.S. update above applies, with the added caveat that it will take a few extra days for our fulfillment partner in Amazon to receive and ingest the remaining Arsenal 2 units when they arrive. Given that, we expect all Canada orders to go out by March 3.

Asia/Australia/Other Regions:

We started shipping from Hong Kong to Asia and Australia as expected. Many of these (of all USB types) have gone out, but the Chinese New Year slowdown and subsequent Hong Kong COVID spike has affected us more than we thought (we own part of this and should have accounted for a larger slowdown due to CNY). Given the COVID spike, I’m going to be conservative and say we’ll get the remaining units all shipped by February 25th, though hoping most/all will be done sooner.

Europe:

While all other regions have begun shipping and have at least half shipped, Europe we, unfortunately, haven’t begun yet (outside of some BETA units and a few non-EU shipments).

As I wrote in the last update, our units have been stuck at customs for some time (some dating back to December). We kept being told they would be released soon, only for that not to occur. Yesterday we were finally given a “formal” firm date when the Arsenal 2s would clear customs and be available to us, and that date is 2/16 (we have pickup scheduled for that day).

Given time for the units to get to our fulfillment centers and be checked in, we’ll start shipping on February 23 and expect to finish shipping all Europe orders by March 4th. Germany and the Netherlands will go first (one of our fulfillment partners is central to that region and these will arrive quickly), followed by the rest of the EU and UK. Other non-EU European countries will go out a bit earlier, on par with the Asia/Australia schedule.

Software Updates

Bug Squashin’

If your Arsenal 2 has shipped and you’ve been using it, you’ve probably noticed our weekly app updates. The dev team and I have been heads down working through bugs, enhancing features, and adding some polish to things. Arsenal is a very complex product and we support over 100 cameras. While some cameras are the same, most require some unique code to get them to work with Arsenal 2. We learned a lot from Arsenal 1 on how to test better, handle edge cases better, and how to quickly fix anything we miss. I’m happy to say that our bug list at this point is very small (something we definitely couldn’t say right after shipping Arsenal 1). We still have a few edge cases we need to track down, but really, the software side has gone very well and performance/experience are in a really good place.

Panorama

For the last two months, the software team and I have needed to focus on bug fixes and testing, but with half the units now shipped, I think we can safely say we’re close to being back full-time on features. We had hoped to get more time to get Panorama out the door, but the rollout demanded quite a bit of dev time. That said, we’ll be back working on it shortly. We’re hoping to have it to beta testers late this month; we’ll keep you posted.

New Cameras (Sony people, rejoice - Part Two)

In the last update, we announced support for the Sony A1 and now we’re announcing the Sony A7 IV is supported. While most of our focus has been on launch, we were able to look at the Sony A7 IV and it was a pretty simple add, so we fit it in (sometimes we get lucky and the APIs don’t change a ton from one camera to the next evolution).

Wrap Up

We’re very close to getting all of the Arsenal 2 pre-orders shipped and we’re so excited to see what you create. Thanks again for your patience and for all of your incredible support.

• Ryan

P.S. I included a few pictures of our US warehouse and Arsenal 2s going out the door. Thanks to Joe (our Fulfillment Manager) and everyone that’s helped pitch in to get units moving!