[HN Gopher] A microcontroller board with a camera, mic, and Cora...
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A microcontroller board with a camera, mic, and Coral Edge TPU
Author : RafelMri
Score : 60 points
Date : 2022-03-21 09:08 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (coral.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (coral.ai)
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Anyone knows how this compares to the ArduCam Pico4ML.
|
| Camera is the same and i wanted to compare TOPS, but it's not
| listed on the Pico4ML specification page.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| It looks like the processor for the Pico4ML is just the rp2040.
| The Coral tpu is a specialized chip that's fast as hell for
| what it does.
|
| https://coral.ai/docs/edgetpu/benchmarks/
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Since the pico is 133 MHz and seeing the benchmark. It would
| be safe to say that the Coral is easily 100* faster.
|
| I'm wondering about the price though. The ArduCam is only
| 35$.
| ge96 wrote:
| Curious what's the deal with Mbit over Mbyte bigger-looking
| number?
|
| I think it is impressive cramming an ML model into something
| small like this, wonder if you could go as far as VIO.
|
| Random thought: you attach one to the front of a football, you
| throw it and it can steer itself through trees (servo tail).
| dotancohen wrote:
| > Random thought: you attach one to the front of a football,
| you > throw it and it can steer itself through trees
| (servo tail).
|
| You could also have it ignite an Estes D engine after the
| football leaves the hand.
| kube-system wrote:
| I'm ready for the stuffmadehere video already.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Bare chips and data on wires are bits, files and products are
| bytes.
|
| 4 TOPS with 2 TOPS/W is also interesting, this thing has 2W
| TDP!?
| alias_neo wrote:
| Why is that surprising?
|
| That's 400mA at 5V, seems reasonable to me.
| site-packages1 wrote:
| I am pretty good at devices like this. Have done a lot of
| raspberry pi development, arduino, nvidia jetson etc. for real ML
| production application. I ordered a Coral before and just had no
| luck. Worked for some contrived applications, but had nothing but
| trouble with the drivers and anything remotely custom just
| failed. It's cool tech, but I'll pass on this vanity project that
| will undoubtedly get cancelled right as people start to rely on
| it.
| joshvm wrote:
| I'm on the fence. It's a very nice device if you can get your
| models working on it - basically untouched at the price/power
| point. Drivers for me have been OK. I have an M.2 card
| connected to a Jetson devkit (makes for a nice embedded test
| bench) and it runs fine, no worse than the NCS for setup
| anyway^. There were a couple of PCI settings to tweak but I
| documented the setup here [0]. For common use cases it's a
| decent option, I think. For custom models you really need to
| know what you're doing.
|
| The main issue I've had is that the compiler behaviour differs
| between versions (and it's very difficult to find older
| releases), so where previously you could run a big model and
| delegate things to the CPU, now it sometimes won't compile at
| all. There were also problems where we trained a model in
| AutoML - using free credits but the real cost would have been
| over $100 - and the edgetpu compiled model lost a lot of
| performance for no apparent reason. The developers have been
| very helpful when I've contacted them, and generally you can
| get through to real devs (not generic support) who can look at
| your model for you. Mostly I think you need to take care when
| training models for these devices, but quantisation-aware
| training is not trivial to use in Tensorflow and there are only
| a few off-the-shelf models which are supported in the various
| toolkits. Model maker looks promising, but it's also finnicky
| in my experience [1]. I guess that's my main caution: it's
| often very difficult to figure out why your model performance
| goes to crap when you compile it, especially if the input
| TFLite model is fine.
|
| I'm not super worried about hardware availability. They're
| suffering from the chip shortage like everyone else, so it's
| not surprising that lead times are long. I was able to buy my
| device in late 2020 without any trouble.
|
| They also make a nice little environmental sensor + OLED board
| that's compatible with Pi headers and is the same form factor
| as the Pi Zero. A bit odd, because on the Coral dev board the
| heatsink is squarely in the way and you have to buy an
| extension header for it.
|
| [0] https://github.com/jveitchmichaelis/edgetpu-
| yolo/blob/main/h...
|
| [1] https://www.tensorflow.org/lite/guide/model_maker
|
| ^Remember that time when Intel released an OpenVINO installer
| that clobbered any existing OpenCV build on your system?
| d--b wrote:
| > Coral - Build beneficial and privacy preserving AI. A local AI
| platform to strengthen society, improve the environment, and
| enrich lives
|
| Er... Sure you can use it for robots, but that device seems
| pretty well suited to to do covert face/voice recognition...
| Luker88 wrote:
| Do they even care about the drivers though?
|
| I bought their m.2 dual tpu and the drivers are in a really bad
| state
|
| They got in the linux kernel, staging, then basically no work
| done. They continued the development off-tree, going out of sync
| with what the kernel had. Only 4.19 supported if I remember
| correctly.
|
| Finally removed from the kernel in...5.13?
|
| Driver wise I can't say that this company is trustworthy
| dekhn wrote:
| it's a hobby project for a few folks with tenure at google.
| I've tried to buy a bunch of these over time and the few I was
| able to get were close to useless.
| pridkett wrote:
| This was the bane of my existence for a few months. Tried it on
| several different systems and the best I could ever do was
| getting a single TPU to show up.
|
| Eventually I just sold it, and back when you could buy them,
| picked up a couple more USB Corals. Works well enough, but it's
| ugly.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Software is always the biggest issue with these products.
| That's why nobody can dethrone Raspberry Pi.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Spot on, better a crappy hardware platform with excellent
| software than the other way around, even if in theory you can
| fix it all, if you value your time the decision is easy.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Yep, raspberrypi, arduino and in the last few years, esp* are
| defacto standards just because of the great software (and
| library) support.
|
| Yes, STM _, XYZ, Cabbge_ Pi, etc., is better, faster, has
| sata, has emmc storage, has more pins, less power usage, has
| this and that, but if I can't program it now, because of
| software bugs, and won't be able to program in in 5 years,
| because the toolchain will be abandoned by now, I really
| don't need it.
|
| source: I have a bunch of microcontrollers and single-board
| computers, collecting dust in a drawer at work.
| eggy wrote:
| I was playing with the K210 RISC-V 64 AI Camera from M5 Stack. It
| is fun, but the training takes place on a server vs. the chip.
| There is supposedly a way to do it on your own laptop, and then
| download it to the chip, but I stopped tooling around with it by
| that point. I was looking to use it for some hydroponics ML work.
| bushbaba wrote:
| Isn't this owned by google? Curious why you'd use TPUs at the
| edge over other chips with long term support and better community
| uptick.
| 70rd wrote:
| What are the alternatives with these specs (power draw,
| mainly)?
| joshvm wrote:
| At the same power level and general availability with OK
| support, you're looking at the MyriadX/NCS2. Even then I
| think the Coral beats it on performance. Next step up is the
| Jetson Nano (10-15 W) which is a lot more beefy, but power
| hungry. There are also a bunch of chip companies that make
| accelerators, like the RK3399Pro from Rockchip and some other
| OEMs from China, but I have no idea how good the docs and
| availability are if you're not a big partner. The RK3399 has
| mainline kernel support which is attractive, but again there
| aren't many reliable board vendors. Khadas make some nice
| looking SBCs.
|
| I was also faintly surprised to learn that the Paralella
| still exists! I always wanted one to play with and I thought
| they discontinued them.
| no_time wrote:
| Coral products in general are made from unobtanium. Especially
| the m.2 variant that's keyed right for desktop motherboards. The
| mouser page says it's EOL but support claims it's still
| manufactured.
|
| Also at first glance, the docs and software support are
| questionable at best.
| marek_rapidlab wrote:
| There is already such a thing: https://rapidlab.io/raco-edge-ai-
| gateway/
|
| disclaimer: I sell these :)
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Isn't the Coral patented? What's the price?
| haneefmubarak wrote:
| You can buy the chips from them for a sufficient price.
|
| The price is probably something unreasonable, with a high
| minimum order quantity or high lead time - because that's
| typically what happens when you see "Ask for Price" or
| "Request a Quote" (folks who do that often want to reduce
| your ability to comparison shop easily).
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Brave of them to release new hardware, when even their old stuff
| has ridiculous lead times.
|
| I've been trying to find the Coral USB Accelerator[0] for a
| Frigate installation for a few years now. Mouser Europe has a
| lead time of ... 81 weeks! Other distributors just say "nope".
|
| [0] https://coral.ai/products/accelerator
| alias_neo wrote:
| There's a decent number of people looking to buy the USB
| accelerator for use with Frigate but lead times are going way
| into 2023.
|
| I've been trying to get one for ~1yr but it's not happening any
| time soon.
|
| It's not a complaint, but I'm surprised they're releasing new
| hardware soon when people can't even get the hardware they have
| now.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| I can sell you mine if you want .
| theshrike79 wrote:
| The going rate for USB Accelerators is 300EUR++ on eBay. MSRP
| is $59.
|
| I don't need it _that_ much. =)
| blackfawn wrote:
| Agreed, their existing products are impossible to source. I've
| been trying to find a USB Accelerator, Mini PCIe Accelerator,
| or M.2 Accelerator for quite a while. I don't even care which,
| just any one of them! Deciding to release a "Dev Board Micro"
| when they already have a "Dev Board" and "Dev Board Mini" and
| all their other "Accelerator" products are unavailable seems a
| bit silly.
| hedgehog wrote:
| Crazy, they were handing these things out as conference
| freebies a while back and now they're $400 on eBay. Pretty
| sure I still have one in a box somewhere.
| antiquark wrote:
| > A platform from Google
|
| Ah yes, something that will be discontinued 3 months from now.
|
| No thanks!
| pram wrote:
| It's seemingly already semi-abandoned afaict
| cf141q5325 wrote:
| Have to say the processor used has me a lot more interested then
| the board
|
| >NXP i.MX RT1176 (Cortex-M7 and Cortex-M4)
|
| An cortex M that has dual GBit Ethernet and is usable with at
| least FreeRTOS and Zephyr.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| The decisive factor in this case is the price - of the main
| board, and of the WiFi module.
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(page generated 2022-03-21 23:02 UTC)