The Raspberry Pi 5, a small but powerful computer that has become hugely popular among tech enthusiasts and industrial companies, is now an AI computer, too. The company just released the AI Kit, a $70 expansion kit with a neural network inference accelerator that can be used for local inference.
With this new expansion module, Raspberry Pi is taking advantage of its HAT+ expansion card, where HAT stands for “Hardware Attached on Top,” a cutesy acronym the company uses for expansion cards that can be mounted on top of a regular Raspberry Pi.
The Raspberry Pi's HAT+ expansion card adds an M.2 slot, a standard expansion slot commonly used for PC components (for our nitty-gritty readers, this slot connects to the Raspberry Pi via a single-lane PCIe 3.0 interface operating at 8Gbps).
The company also partnered 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 on edge devices such as cars, smart cameras, robots and now Raspberry Pi devices.
The accelerator module that Raspberry Pi uses for its AI Kit is the Hailo-8L, an entry-level module in M.2 form factor that can be easily installed in the HAT+.
Once you install everything, you'll have a Raspberry Pi 5 with 13 Tera Operations per Second (TOPS) of inference performance. This isn't impressive compared to the performance of an Nvidia GPU, but it's cost-effective and runs on the Raspberry Pi's default 27W power supply.
On the software side, the latest release of Raspberry Pi OS will automatically detect the Hailo module, and the Neural Processing Unit will be available to the OS and any applications that use it.
Raspberry Pi has also updated its camera application suite to now support neural network inference as part of the camera pipeline, for example, object detection (“this is a banana”), semantic segmentation (“these three objects are moving vehicles”), instance segmentation (“these three moving vehicles are a truck, a red car and a blue car”), pose estimation, facial landmarking, and more.
These are just a few 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 be used for much more than just cameras.
It will be interesting to see new use cases emerge from the Raspberry Pi community. This AI expansion kit is a tool. Now it's up to Raspberry Pi customers to think about what they want to do with it.