[HN Gopher] Show HN: AI model on a $3 chip (esp32)
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: AI model on a $3 chip (esp32)
We finished a design that allows a plug-and-play solution with
TensorFlow Lite and a web server with the UI on ESP32. Here is a
video of the process: https://youtu.be/aEZX3JMzwTo I wanted to
share the design in case anyone is interested as the camera is
aimed at developers who want to play with AI models on the embedded
side.
Author : h317
Score : 68 points
Date : 2023-02-02 20:33 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (maxlab.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (maxlab.io)
| txtai wrote:
| Very interesting! Looking forward to seeing more embedded AI
| devices coming out.
|
| More NLP based, but here is an article on an effort to build
| Transformers micromodels to run on embedded devices. The model in
| this example is under 1MB.
|
| https://neuml.hashnode.dev/train-a-language-model-from-scrat...
| moffkalast wrote:
| Nice job, though a smaller PCB would've been more practical? The
| ESP32-CAM is definitely a bit tricky to work with software-wise.
|
| I'm not sure how much sense it actually makes to run anything
| onboard unless you want to take a snapshot every few seconds and
| then spending a while classifying it. I've eventually just
| resorted to streaming at SVGA and decent framerates and then
| processing the output on another machine.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| How much do you plan to offer it for?
| ottobonn wrote:
| I signed up for updates! I have been looking for something
| exactly like this for home automation, to detect occupancy, pets,
| etc. I am very excited to pair it with HomeAssistant!
| [deleted]
| graiz wrote:
| The ESP32 is a pretty standard sensor chip and the camera version
| is also widely available. A basic version of OpenCV was ported ~3
| years ago, so it's cool but not sure what's new here.
| amelius wrote:
| How would you characterize the performance of this chip, and
| especially the AI part?
| inspirerhetoric wrote:
| What camera chip are you using?
| drdaeman wrote:
| Hmm... does it really work as advertised? Can it really run some
| basic object detection in real-time on-device, and at what
| resolution/framerate combination(s)?
|
| Sorry for being skeptical, just that it sounds too incredible to
| believe. I've toyed around with the same chips you're using,
| OV2640 with ESP32-S3 and at any decent resolution it simply
| seemed to lack the processing power to run even simple motion
| detection, let alone anything fancier. Surely it was kind of fine
| at low-res and it kinda works spotting an elephant in a room, but
| it was completely incapable for detecting small fast-moving
| targets (roaches) under less than perfect lighting conditions
| (bathroom ceiling lights, decent but not overly bright). Best it
| could do was serving a 1024p@5fps MJPEG stream over a network to
| a more powerful machine for further processing.
| nl wrote:
| TFLite is designed for this:
|
| > It has been tested extensively with many processors based on
| the Arm Cortex-M Series architecture, and has been ported to
| other architectures including ESP32.
|
| https://www.tensorflow.org/lite/microcontrollers
|
| Additionally there is an optimized kernel for ESP32:
| https://github.com/espressif/tflite-micro-esp-examples
|
| Edit: personally, I like the Sipeed MAIX for this application,
| although the software was pretty annoying when I used it (in
| 2020).
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I'm able to do it with a less powerful chip, albeit low
| resolution and grayscale.
|
| I'm hoping to make a pest detector for my automated hydroponic
| garden. It seems very tractable at this point.
| daveloyall wrote:
| I'm skeptical, too. But apparently OP isn't the only one using
| (or trying to use) "TensorFlow-Lite for Microcontrollers" on an
| ESP32-S3. See this (little bit of) chatter:
| https://github.com/tensorflow/tflite-micro/search?q=esp32&ty...
| drdaeman wrote:
| I haven't tried but it must be doable at low-res low-
| framerate conditions, where CPUs still have plenty of time
| left between the frames and frames aren't big (so maybe it
| can even fully decode those JPEGs, not just extract the DC
| coefficients for a quick-and-dirty hacks).
|
| It's just the advertising page that sounds kinda
| unbelievable: low power, night vision, image analysis on the
| device, perfect for wildlife monitoring, can detect pests on
| crops (implying high resolution unless we're talking about
| deer and rabbits lol), etc etc.
| ge96 wrote:
| Here's a video of a guy squeezing an ML model into a Teensy
| granted the Teensy is pretty powerful
|
| https://youtu.be/6raRftH9yxM?t=436
|
| edit: I will say processing IMU data is probably (a lot) easier
| than frame by frame of some video
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-02-02 23:00 UTC)