The latest version of the Raspberry Pi, the small but powerful computer that has become quite popular among tech hobbyists and industrial companies, can now be an artificial intelligence computer as well. The company on Tuesday released the AI kitwhich is a $70 expansion kit with a neural network inference accelerator that can be used for local inference, for the Raspberry Pi 5.
For this new expansion module, the Raspberry Pi takes advantage of the HAT+ expansion card. HAT stands for “Hardware Attached on Top,” a cute acronym the company uses for expansion cards you attach to a regular Raspberry Pi.
The HAT+ expansion card adds an M.2 slot, which is a standard expansion slot commonly used for computer components. For our readers interested in the details: This socket connects to the Raspberry Pi via a single-lane PCIe 3.0 interface running at 8 Gbps.
The company has partnered for the kit with Hailo, an AI chip startup that recently raised $120 million and is looking to challenge Nvidia. Hailo specializes in chips designed to run AI workloads in cutting-edge devices such as cars, smart cameras, robotics and now Raspberry Pi devices.
The acceleration module that the Raspberry Pi uses for the AI kit is the Hailo-8L. It’s an entry-level drive in the M.2 form factor, meaning it can easily plug into the HAT+.
Once everything is installed, you get a Raspberry Pi 5 capable of inference at 13 tera-operations per second (TOPS). It’s not much compared to an Nvidia GPU, but it’s cost-effective and works with the Raspberry Pi’s stock 27W power supply.
On the software front, the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS automatically detects the Hailo drive so it can be used immediately by the operating system and applications that take advantage of it.
Raspberry Pi has also updated its suite of camera applications to support neural network inference as part of the camera pipeline. For example, it can be used for object detection (“this is a car”), semantic segmentation (“these three things are moving vehicles”), instance segmentation (“these three moving vehicles are a truck, a red car and a blue car’), pose estimation and face landmark.
These are just examples of what you can do with a Raspberry Pi equipped with an AI kit and a first- or third-party camera. But the Hailo chip can also be used for cases without using a camera.
It will be interesting to see the Raspberry Pi community come up with new uses for this kit. This AI expansion kit is a tool, and now, it’s up to Raspberry Pi customers to figure out what they want to do with it.
