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The AI kit comprises the same M.2 HAT+ recently announced for holding NVMe memory drives, instead loaded with 13Top/s Hailo-8L AI processor.
Connection, according to Raspberry Pi, is over its single-lane “PCIe 3.0 connection running at 8Gbit/s” – which is the first time the organisation has described this interface as 3.0 PCIe. Previously it was calling it PCIe 2.0, with an experimental option to boost it to 3.0.
The accelerator (left) is primarily for video processing, either from a video file or direct from a Raspberry Pi camera or 3rd party camera.
It is possible to “run multiple neural networks on a single camera, or single or multiple neural networks with two cameras concurrently”, said Raspberry Pi. “Hailo has created an extensive model zoo, where users can find a wide variety of pre-trained neural network models ready to deploy and optimised to run on the AI Kit.”
To link the camera to the AI framework, the rpicam-apps suite has been given a post-processing template for integrating neural network inferencing running real-time in the camera pipeline.
“By using the pre-installed Hailo Tappas post-processing libraries, we are able to create AI-based applications in only a few hundred lines of C++ code. Similar levels of integration into our Picamera2 framework will follow soon,” said Raspberry Pi, adding: “You are not limited to using the co-processor only in rpicam-apps or Picamera2. We also package an API integrated in the GStreamer framework and native Python or C/C++ applications. This includes non-camera use cases, such as running inference on pre-recorded video files.”
It comes with a 16mm stacking header and hardware to fit it over the Raspberry Pi Active Cooler. Operation is over 0 to 50℃ ambient.
Raspberry Pi AI Kit is priced at $70.
