Went to a tech meetup in Portland and saw someone running an AI model on a Raspberry Pi

They had this little $40 board hooked up to a webcam and it was identifying birds in real time, I was blown away it could handle that without lagging. Has anyone else tried running smaller AI models on low-end hardware like that, and what tools did you use to set it up?

2 comments

2 Comments

andrew_rodriguez5d ago

That's actually a really cool use case. The bird identification thing makes me think you could do the same with a camera pointed at a feeder in your yard. I've been playing with some of the smaller YOLO models like YOLOv8nano on an old laptop with just a CPU. It handles real time object detection okay if you drop the resolution down to like 320x320. There's also TensorFlow Lite which is built for exactly this kind of low power stuff. Some people are even getting good results with MobileNet models on the Pi for classifying plants or bugs.

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gracewebb5d ago

Yeah I've seen people run MobileNet on a Pi Zero with a camera trap and it's surprisingly solid for realtime bug classification.