Pi-oT Raspberry Pi Add-on Board Targets Commercial & Industrial IoT Automation (Crowdfunding)

USA Based Startup Builds RPi Add-on  Pi-oT, a Cleveland based startup has launched a Kickstarter campaign for a Raspberry Pi add-on for commercial and industrial IoT automation. The unit is a full mountable chassis with fan and DIN-rail that extends the Pi’s GPIO with 26-pin terminal connectors and provides 5x relays, 8x ADCs, and power outputs. We have reported on a variety of uses for the Raspberry Pi SBC, from home automation to development in IoT, to hobby projects, and in education settings.  It is not surprising to see an automation module developed for IoT industrial applications around the popular and powerful SBC. The Choices The Kickstarter campaign has passed its low initial target and is set to ship at the end of October. There is an early launch discount on the unit’s price of $40 for commercial and $50 for industrial backers. That early bird type special is 15% […]

Using Sony PS3 Eye Camera as an Inexpensive Microphone Array

PS3 Eye

Almost exactly two years ago to the day, we published an article showing how microphone arrays performed against a single USB microphone, and the latter started to have a poor wake word detection success rate at around 3 meters array even in a silent room, and it got worse with white noise or background music, while the microphone arrays would pick up the wake word with a much higher success rate in all conditions. The price of smart audio development kits varies a lot from $500 for Intel Speech Enabling Developer Kit to $129 for an Allwinner R18-based 3-Mic Far-Field Amazon AVS Development Kit, and $99 for ReSpeaker Core v2. If you’ve already got a Raspberry Pi 3/4 board, you can get cheaper options such as ReSpeaker 4-Mic Array for $25, but nothing beats the price of Sony PS3 Eye camera that comes with a 4 microphone array and sells […]

CutiePi Open Source Tablet uses Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3

The announcement of the CutiePi, an open source tablet-based on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 comes a bit late for the Pi-based tablet/laptop space. We have reported on some of the more versatile tablets using the Raspberry Pi platform, the Diskio Pi 13.3” DIY Tablet and the RasPad tablet kit, with a few more Raspberry Pi-based tablet/laptop kits also listed in the same article. Timeline and Pricing CutiePi Tablet has no firm release date, but the company is saying late 2019 for launch. The development team is also saying everything is subject to change, but look for the pricing to be USD $150 – $250. Click to Enlarge How CutiePi is Different The tablet is different in its thinner design and in the software designed specifically to use Linux Raspbian OS for a touch screen platform. There are readily available source code and case plans for the ambitious developer […]

PiVoyager is a UPS for the Raspberry Pi With a Real-Time Calendar Clock

PiVoyager: the smart UPS for the Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi is a powerful SBC (Single Board Computer), and aside from being used for everyday computing stuff, the Raspberry Pi can be embedded as the brain of various projects. Using the Raspberry Pi for standalone projects do create some concerns about power. How do I power the Pi? Should I get a power bank? Or maybe I need a longer wired connector. If powering your Raspberry Pi based project has always being a concern to you, then you don’t have to worry about it again with the introduction of the PiVoyager. The PiVoyager is an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for the Raspberry Pi specially designed to work with standard Li-Ion or LiPo batteries. It is shaped in the form a Pi Zero HaT making it fully compatible with PiZero form factor, but nevertheless, it will still work with any Raspberry-PI having the conventional 40-pin header found in the Pi […]

MakerPower Solar Power Supply/Charger for IoT & Embedded Systems Supports Lead-acid Batteries (Crowdfunding)

Danjuliodesigns llc. A boutique embedded systems design firm run by engineer and inventor Dan Julio has set up crowdfunding for the makerPower Solar power supply/charger for intelligent power supply just about anywhere and in any climate. A comprehensive device structured to IoT and embedded systems, where sometimes a remote camera or other device needs power all the time. The power source is a solar panel which can charge a standard lead-acid battery (USA availability only) We reported on a solar input board PiJuice battery HAT and although there are other solar input devices on the market, such as the PiJuice, for use with SBC’s such as Raspberry Pi, the makerPower Solar functions at a higher level, incorporating intelligent power control and functioning. The board can be source powered by solar panel through a standard lead-acid battery, rather than a Li-Po or Li-Ion. The inventor felt a source should carry as […]

A Compact Machine Learning Accelerator HAT for your Raspberry Pi

Xalogic PI AI Hat

AI for the Edge has been a promising playing field where several players are pushing for. Cloud computing has made it possible to train complex machine learning models for various application, although this seems to be working fine, the performance or the possibility of deploying AI applications on the Edge is enormous. AI on the Edge is expected to help reduces the latency involved in the roundtrip to the cloud, saves the bandwidth and cloud storage costs for enterprises, deploy ML models faster, and build robust, intelligent applications. Generally, Edge devices like the Raspberry Pi, Arduinos, and other embedded boards usually can’t run powerful AI applications. They have limited resources and computing power. Fortunately, this is changing with the introduction of AI Accelerators; modern processors that help assist the edge devices by taking over the complex mathematical calculations needed for running AI models. One of such AI accelerator processor is […]

TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers Benchmarked on Linux SBCs

TensorFlow Lite microcontrollers benchmark linux SBC

Dimitris Tassopoulos (Dimtass) decided to learn more about machine learning for embedded systems now that the technology is more mature, and wrote a series of five posts documenting his experience with low-end hardware such as STM32 Bluepill board, Arduino UNO, or ESP8266-12E module starting with simple NN examples, before moving to TensorFlow Lite for microcontrollers. Dimitris recently followed up his latest “stupid project” (that’s the name of his blog, not being demeaning here :)) by running and benchmarking TensorFlow Lite for microcontrollers on various Linux SBC. But why? you might ask. Dimitris tried to build tflite C++ API designed for Linux, but found it was hard to build, and no pre-built binary are available except for x86_64. He had no such issues with tflite-micro API, even though it’s really meant for baremetal MCU platforms. Let’s get straight to the results which also include a Ryzen platform, probably a laptop, for […]

Actcast Combines IFTTT-like Service with AI and Raspberry Pi 3 / Zero

Actcast IFTTT Artificial Intelligence

In a report on April 30, 2017, Idein had developed GPGPU accelerated object recognition for the Raspberry Pi platform. That development led to the beta release of the ActCast IoT platform, which was announced on July 29, 2019, and uses deep learning algorithms for object and subject recognition. The program is for use with IoT and AI. The idea is to increase performance and link the system to the web for even more solutions. What it Does The use of physical world information in IoT projects has many applications. Such as a doorbell that sees a person, can then recognize the person. Ultimately letting the user know over the web through a smartphone, the person should be let in. And then the system unlocks the door.  So Actcast is a  bit like IFTTT with artificial intelligence / computer vision capabilities. Edge Computing Bringing the source of data closer to the […]