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SiPeed AI at the Edge



Edge AI looks like going to be the next big things. In this blog post, I am going to introduce a very cheap and yet power AI chip based on Kendryte K210. K210 is based on open source RISC-V instructions set. According to WikipediaRISC-V started in 2010 and in the recent 2 years, actual chips are produced with prototyping boards.

A few China companies have started to build prototyping kits around this chip. One of these company is SiPeed. They have produced a few form factors of prototyping board and I have gotten hold of the Maixpy GO board.
The Maixpy Go has the following features:

  • 2.8 inch touch LCD
  • Camera
  • TF card slot
  • Mic
  • RGB LED
  • Speaker
  • WIFI
  • Rechargeable battery
  • Powered via USB C. The USB-C also act as Uart for transferring of codes and flashing of firmware.
There are a few ways to program the kit, micropython, Arduino IDE or Platform IO. For micropython, there is Maixpy IDE which is a port of OpenMV IDE.

Sipeed also has 2 interesting peripherals, microphone array and binocular camera. The subsequent post I will write more about the 2 peripherals.

Looks like this is going to be a very interesting AI and IoT platform. I will follow-up with more write-up especially the AI portion. Stay tune!

Update: Transfer Learning using mobilenetv1 in colab to generate kmodel file.

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