Doly – A cute little autonomous AI-powered robot based on Raspberry Pi CM4 module (Crowdfunding)

Doly Raspberry Pi CM4 robot

Limitbit Doly is a cute little autonomous robot with two continuous tracks, two small arms controlled by servos, two round color displays acting as the eyes, and various sensors, all controlled by a Raspberry Pi CM4 system-on-module. The robot can be used for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education or as a developer platform. AI workloads can also run on the Raspberry Pi CM4 module taking sensors, camera, and microphone inputs, with the robot interacting with the user through the built-in stereo speaker and two eyes. In practice, that means Doly supports features such as face recognition and smart audio with the robot capable of recognizing its owner and responding to voice commands. Doly specifications: System-on-Module – Raspberry Pi CM4 Lite model CM4101000 (1GB RAM, Wireless) by default, but also supports other CM4/CM Lite modules with wireless Storage – MicroSD card slot Display – 2x high-resolution color displays (the […]

Luxonis OAK Thermal – A PoE thermal camera with Myriad X AI accelerator, waterproof M12 and M8 connectors

Luxonis OAK Thermal camera

Luxonis has announced its first thermal camera with the OAK Thermal (OAK-T) based on the company’s OAK-SoM Pro AI module featuring an Intel Movidius Myriad X, and two waterproof ports with an M12 PoE/Ethernet connector and an M8 auxiliary connector. Luxonis has been making AI cameras based on Myriad X AI accelerator and its Depth AI solution at least since 2019, and its module is also found in third-party cameras as we’ve recently found out with the Arducam PiNSIGHT AI camera. But they had never made a thermal model, and following customers’ requests to fuse thermal and RGB data, they’ve now developed the OAK Thermal, or OAK-T for shorts, that is suitable for detecting leaks and fires or more accurately detect humans & animals than traditional vision-only based cameras. OAK Thermal camera specifications: System-on-Module – Luxonis OAK-SoM Pro with AI accelerator – Intel Movidius Myriad X AI vision processing unit […]

Femto Mega 3D depth camera review – OrbbecViewer and Orbbec SDK in Ubuntu 22.04, body tracking in Windows 11

Orbbec Femto Mega Review

We had a quick look at the Orbbec Femto Mega 3D depth and 4K RGB camera at the end of last year with a look at the hardware and a quick try with the OrbbecViewer program in Ubuntu 22.04. I’ve now had the time to test the OrbbecViewer in more detail, check out the Orbbec SDK in Linux and various samples, and finally test the Femto Mega with a body tracking application using Unity in Windows 11. A closer look at OrbbecViewer program and settings As noted in the first part of the review, the OrbbecViewer program provides color, depth, and IR views for the camera. Let’s go into details for each. The Color mode would be the same as your standard USB color camera. The Femto Mega supports resolution from 1280×720 at 30 fps to 3840×2160 at 25 fps using MJPG, H.264, H.265, or RGB (converted from MJPG). We […]

Persee N1 – A modular camera-computer based on the NVIDIA Jetson Nano

Orbbec Parsee N1 camera computer kit

The Persee N1 is a modular camera-computer kit recently launched by 3D camera manufacturer, Orbbec. Not too long ago, we covered their 3D depth and RGB USB-C camera, the Femto Bolt. The Persee N1 was designed for 3D computer vision applications and is built on the Nvidia Jetson platform. It combines the quad-core processor of the Jetson Nano with the imaging capabilities of a stereo-vision camera. The Jetson Nano’s impressive GPU makes it particularly appropriate for edge machine learning and AI projects. The company also offers the Femto Mega, an advanced and more expensive alternative that uses the same Jetson Nano SoM. The Persee N1 camera-computer also features official support for the open-source computer vision library, OpenCV. The camera is suited for indoor and semi-outdoor operation and uses a custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for enhanced depth processing. It also provides advanced features like multi-camera synchronization and IMU (inertial measurement […]

Robustel introduces EG5101 and EG5200 Debian 11 industrial IoT gateways with 4G LTE cellular connectivity

Robustel EG5101 EG5200 Debian 11 industrial gateways

Robustel introduced the EG5101 and EG5200 industrial IoT gateways running Debian 11 a few weeks ago, both with 4G LTE cellular connectivity, but the NXP i.MX 6ULL-based EG5101 has a more compact design, while the NXP i.MX 8M Plus-powered EG5200 provides more I/Os and resources. Expanding the earlier EG5100, EG5120, and LG5100 models from the company, the two edge computing gateways target Industry 4.0 and smart infrastructure applications and enable real-time analytics at the edge with lower latency than running workloads in the cloud. Robustel EG5101 and EG5200 SoC/Memory/Storage EG5101 NXP i.MX 6ULL Cortex-A7 32-bit processor @ 792 MHz 512MB to 1024MB DDR3 8GB eMMC flash EG5200 NXP i.MX 8M Plus quad-core Cortex-A53 64-bit processor @ 1.6 GHz with 2.3 TOPS NPU 4GB DDR4 32GB eMMC flash, microSD card socket Connectivity EG5101 1x 10/100 Mbps Ethernet port 4G LTE with 1x SMA-K antenna connector, 2x Mini SIM (2FF) EG5200 5x […]

Gigadevice GD32VW553 RISC-V microcontroller supports WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 LE

GD32VW553 WiFi 6 Bluetooth 5.2 LE

Gigadevice GD32VW553 is a new 160MHz RISC-V microcontroller for IoT applications with support for WiFi 6 (802.11ax) and Bluetooth 5.2 Low Energy (LE) and available in QFN32 and QFN40 packages with up to 28 GPIOs. As an IoT chip, the chip supports various power modes and target wake time (TWT) for low power consumption, as well as WiFi features such as WPA3 and WiFi direct, while the radio can handle Bluetooth 5.2 LE bit rates of up to 2 Mbps and support the Long Range mode. Gigadevice GD32VW553 specifications: MCU core – 32-bit Nuclei N307 RISC-V core @ up to 160 MHz with RV32I / M / A / F / D / C / P / B instruction extensions Memory – 320KB SRAM Storage – 2048KB or 4096KB flash Wireless WiFI 6 802.11b/g/n/ax HT20 up to 114.7Mbps 802.11e QoS Enhancement (WMM). 802.11i (WPA, WPA2, WPA3). Open, shared key, and […]

Rockchip roadmap reveals RK3576 and RK3506 IoT processors, Linux 6.1 SDK

Rockchip Roadmap 2024

The Rockchip RK3588 processor may remain the most powerful processor from the company for a while as an updated Rockchip IoT processor roadmap reveals the new RK3576 octa-core SoC and RK3506 tri-core Cortex-A7 chip, as well as a Linux 6.1 SDK to be released in Q4 2023. With the limited information we have, the Rockchip RK3576 looks to be a cost-down version of the RK3588 processor with eight cores, a 6 TOPS NPU, a 4K video codec, as well as PCIe and USB-C interfaces. Strangely the Rockchip RK3582 that should serve a similar purpose is not showing up in the roadmap. [Update: The RK3576 is indeed a lower-cost SoC but features four Cortex-A72 and four Cortex-A53 cores instead as per the comparison table reproduced below: That also means we now have the RK3576 specifications (some obtained from another document too): CPU Octa-core Arm processor with 4x Cortex-A72 cores at 2.2 […]

Generative AI on NVIDIA Jetson Orin, Jetpack 6 SDK to support multiple OSes

Jetson Orin Generative AI

NVIDIA has had several announcements at ROSCon 2023 related to robotics & embedded with highlights including generative AI on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin module and the Jetpack 6 SDK will be released next month (November 2023) with supports for Ubuntu as usual, but also other operating systems and platforms such as Debian, Yocto, Wind River, Redhawk RTOS, and Balena. Generative AI on NVIDIA Jetson Orin There’s been a lot of hype in the last year about generative AI thanks to services such as ChatGPT, Google Bard, or Microsoft Bing Chat. But those rely on closed-source software that runs on powerful servers in the cloud. As we noted in our article about the “AI in a box” offline LLM solution there are some open-source projects such as Whisper speech-to-text model and Llama2 language models that could be run on embedded hardware at the edge, but as noted by some readers platforms […]

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