The Coral Dev Board (2019), Dev Board Mini (2020) and Dev Board Micro (2023) are almost really awesome. They were really the first products to make running Edge AI operations feasible, the product of Google’s own development of products like it’s smart speakers and smartphones. On the positive side, Google hasn’t killed them yet like it has done so many other things, but support appears to be pretty limited. For example, the Coral Dev Board I am using is running with the most recent update, late 2021, and with Python 3.7, end of life. And yet it does work, and setup was relatively painless.
My recommendation for most people would be to use the Raspberry Pi with one of the AI accelerators they package with it. Raspberry Pi offers strong support, and absolutely no other product beats it in ease of use. Nvidia’s Jetson products have the best performance, but are a bit power hungry and weaker on support. Countless other vendors, like STMicro, sell boards with AI accelerators, but generally it’s all downhill from a raspberry pi product in terms of actually able to do things without spending months pounding your head against the documentation.
So why did I choose the Coral? Because I wanted to use MoveNet, which from my research was the fastest pose estimation model with good accuracy, and it was directly designed by Google for the EdgeTPU. I wanted fast, low latency, power efficient pose estimation coming out within a handful of milliseconds and the Coral Dev Board could do that without too much hassle. The Coral products in general remain some of the best lowest power options for edge inference, and while not painless to use, most coders of moderate experience should be able to figure them out for basic use.
Note that from my research, the Dev Board Mini is higher latency than the original Coral Dev board.
The Coral Dev board has a ridiculous requirement where it doesn’t want you to power it off by unplugging it. You have to do a software shutdown, but it doesn’t provide a button for that. I wired up a button pretty easily and setup a simple script to power off when pressed. That’s in the linked GitHub and seems to work fine.
Also, given the last security update was 2021, I wouldn’t expose these in an vulnerable environments. Connected to the internet behind a firewall should be fine.
I’m hopeful Google might throw some more energy back at the Coral product line, but I wouldn’t count on it.
Project Code: https://github.com/winedarksea/pose_deployment
