COMING SOON – Machine Learning BrainCraft HAT for Raspberry Pi 4
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The idea behind the BrainCraft board (stand-alone, and Pi “hat”) is that you’d be able to “craft brains” for Machine Learning on the EDGE, with Microcontrollers & Microcomputers. On ASK AN ENGINEER, our founder & engineer chatted with Pete Warden, the technical lead of the mobile, embedded TensorFlow Group on Google’s Brain team about what would be ideal for a board like this.
And here’s a first look! We’ve started to design a BrainCraft HAT for Raspberry Pi and other Linux computers. It has a 240×240 TFT display for inference output, slot for camera connector cable for imaging projects, a 5 way joystick and button for UI input, left and right microphones, stereo headphone, stereo speaker out, three RGB DotStar LEDs, two 3 pin STEMMA connectors on PWM pins so they can drive NeoPixels or servos, and Grove/STEMMA/Qwiic I2C port. This should let people build a wide range of audio/video AI projects while also allowing easy plug-in of sensors and robotics!
Most importantly, there’s an On/Off switch that will disable the audio codec, so that when it’s off there’s no way it’s listening to you!
Inputs:
- Loads of sensors!
- More sensors can be connected via plug-n-play stemmaQT
- Image sensors, like a camera, or ‘image sensors’ like the Panasonic Grid-EYE. Heat-Sensitive cameras can be used as a person detector, even in the
- dark!
- Microphone, voice detection for powering on/off
- Accelerometer for gestures, vibration sensing. Could be useful for machinery/industrial predictive maintenance.
Outputs:
- Screen display for debugging
- Speaker for audio feedback as to what is going on.
- Relay control to turn things on/off, etc. and/or other actuators.
Connectivity:
- NB / Narrowband IoT? Wireless flexibility: WiFi, cellular, Bluetooth LE
- Works with adafruit.io, of course!
Power:
- Battery powered / low-power.
- Solar add-ons or energy harvesting. Make OK with lots of power sources that are not reliable.
- On/Off switch!