[HN Gopher] How AI on Microcontrollers Works: Operators and Kernels
___________________________________________________________________
How AI on Microcontrollers Works: Operators and Kernels
Author : hasheddan
Score : 77 points
Date : 2025-06-30 12:53 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (danielmangum.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (danielmangum.com)
| Neywiny wrote:
| In the same way "embedded" is relative, I appreciate the author's
| recognition that "edge" is relative. For some, AI at the edge
| means on-prem server farms. For some it means a mini-pc. For
| others, maybe an SBC. Here it's a microcontroller. Further still
| is AI within the sensors a microcontroller would talk to. That's
| probably just another microcontroller but still.
| woliveirajr wrote:
| Microcontrollers all the way down
| astrobe_ wrote:
| There's "micro" and "micro". The microcontroller operating a
| simple coffee machine, or a simple washing-machine is
| probably 8 or 16 bits. This is what I would call "bare
| metal", as they don't run an OS, only off-the-shelf
| frameworks at best.
|
| For "bigger" devices, it's usually a Cortex inside a system-
| on-chip or system-on-module, 32 bits single core and a few Mb
| of RAM for low-end (enough to run regular Linux distro
| instead of uClinux for instance), 64 bits multicore for high-
| end devices that deal with audio/video. That kind of business
| is often resource-hungry in every way.
|
| I work with that kind of stuff, and to me these
| "microcontrollers" are just monsters that I hesitate to call
| "micro" when some of my coworkers work on much smaller chips
| with only a few K of RAM available.
| Neywiny wrote:
| I do wish sometimes they used the bigger micro, though. We
| have some power supplies that technically have an Ethernet
| interface. But when using it, even for SCPI over TCP
| (forget about the virtual front panel that takes a minute
| to update), it lags so bad the output enable button needs a
| few tries to toggle. I should practice yanking the positive
| wire for an emergency
| amelius wrote:
| Indeed. Is nVidia Jetson "edge" or not?
| simgt wrote:
| Of course it is. Edge mostly stands for network edge, Jetsons
| aren't meant to be deployed in data centers.
| amelius wrote:
| I don't understand why we need a separate "lite" format for
| microcontrollers.
|
| Wouldn't it be advantageous if we used ONNX for everything?
| https://onnx.ai/
| batuhandumani wrote:
| tf-lite micro library has many advantages, and the first of
| these is the tensorFlow framework itself. You can train the
| model easily and then implement the same or a similar
| architecture on esp-32s without much effort. Another advantage
| is its optimization and you can easily intervene in various
| memory optimizations and even though it is not a large one, it
| does have a community.
|
| Apart from these, for example, the author implemented the model
| the traditional way using C, but it is more convenient to use
| tf-lite micro on esp32s with the Berry script language.
|
| However, since I have never used onnxin this kind of project, I
| cant speak to its advantages, so comparisons are difficult from
| my perspective. But as I said, tf-lite and offer benefits like
| easy integration, good optimization, and as the name implies,
| tensorFlow.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-07-04 23:02 UTC)