During our early access program, we sent thousands upon thousands of early revision units to developers around the globe for free. The Revision 4 series was sent out in October and November 2012, while Revisions 5 and 6 were launched in December 2012 and January 2013. The final production version that launched in July 2013 was Revision 7.
At the time of writing, Revision 6 models should still continue to work fairly well, though ongoing support is not guaranteed as our software continues to evolve. Here’s a quick reference for all the amazing early revision developers who helped us get to where we are today.
In terms of size, Rev 4 was the largest module we’ve ever made. Its dimensions were 92 mm x 30 mm x 20 mm. The reason for this was a purposefully conservative circuit layout design, which allowed us to quickly iterate and debug the hardware. Its range and accuracy were significantly less than the next generation.
The Rev 5 module used the final PCB size of 72 mm x 23 mm, though its height was still larger than Rev 6, because we used pre-production (off-the-shelf) lenses as seen in Rev 4. The unit was produced inside of an aluminum box which resembled the final product (aside from the much larger height).
The Rev 6 module featured a custom optical assembly, which reduced the height to less than half the Rev 5 device. Since our final LEDs have a special emitter/optical combo, Rev 7 expanded the LED/sensor field-of-view from 110 degrees to a much larger 140 degrees.
Want to learn more about the evolution of the Leap Motion Controller? Read industrial designer Kyle Hay’s blog post on designing the hardware.
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