Continuing with the same 2GB Raspberry Pi I used to try out Ubuntu for IoT, I reloaded it with Raspbian Buster and plugged Google’s Coral Accelerator. I’d gotten it yesterday for $75 from Amazon. The Raspberry Pi 4 comes with two USB 3 ports and a reasonably up-to-date and fast quad-core CPU. I had given serious consideration to purchasing Nvidia’s Jason Nano, but it came with its own support SBC with a CPU no better than a Raspberry Pi 3, and to top it off I’d have had to install and learn the peculiar ways of yet another Linux distribution for the Nano. The monitory difference between the Coral and the Nano is inconsequential; the cost is the much larger investment in time required to master yet another Linux system as well as using the Nvidia GPU. I have neither the time nor patience for that anymore. Give me something that I can quickly plug into and use with what I already have.

Getting set up and running was super fast. It took about 15 minutes to go online for the setup directions, install the Coral support libraries, git clone an example, plug in the Coral, and then run the example. The example ran successfully. All the steps where very straightforward and fast.

I then decided to run a secound example, this time Google’s detection example.

It’s difficult to see if you don’t zoom into the screen capture, but if you do you will see Admiral Grace Hopper’s tie is identified and a red box drawn around it. This is test #2, and a bit more interesting than the first test.

Not much more to offer at this point as all I’m doing is pulling the examples and giving them a spin. I’ll work on writing something more original when I better understand the system. Fortunately all the higher level software is written in Python. For me it’s a joy to work with Python, especially version 3, on any system.

Hopefully more to come.