Machine Learning That’s Light Enough for an Arduino

https://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/machine-learning-thats-light-enough-for-an-arduino

115 24 7 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

StavrosK2• 7 years ago

What does a Cortex have to do with the Arduino? These processors have a difference of many orders of magnitude in power, so much so that this title is basically pure clickbait.

The Arduino has 2 KB of RAM, you can't even record much sound on it, much less do ML.

mason55• 7 years ago

The headline should say “Arduino-compatible boards” but otherwise it’s all applicable. There are plenty of Arduino-compatible Cortex M0 and M4 boards out there.

StavrosK2• 7 years ago

Oh, like the Leonardo et al? I guess that makes sense, I forgot about those, thanks.

ohazi• 7 years ago

Amusingly, the USB interface MCU on the new Arduino Nano (SAMD11 Cortex-M0+) is more powerful than the AVR that runs the sketch (ATmega4809). Less flash and SRAM though, which seems to be the primary cost driver these days.

[1] https://store.arduino.cc/usa/nano-every

sbierwagen• 7 years ago

The Arduino Due has a big Cortex M3 chip on it, costs ten bucks more than an Uno, and came out 7 years ago. Doesn't have enough RAM to run the demo in the OP though.

mciancia• 7 years ago

There are many arduino boards, some more powerfull than other, many based on ARM MCUs (for example, arduino due) Afair some even run openwrt

leggomylibro• 7 years ago

"Arduino" is the company - it doesn't refer to an ATMega328p. It's just a thin wrapper around the Processing IDE, and it supports lots of different boards and chipsets.

So I agree, the title is sort of odd, but you absolutely can use Arduino for ML. Personally I think it is clunky and difficult to use compared to modern offerings like PlatformIO or MicroPython, but it's familiar to a lot of people and there is value in that.

makapuf2• 7 years ago

it doesn't refer to an atmega328p

You're right, it refers to an ide. That definition is restrictive, it would imply that Arduino is not capable of running anything itself (you need a board for that). Or that I can run anything provided you can compile it from arduino ide(you can run gcc).

I'm sorry but whatever the official description is, for many people including me, runs on an arduino means runs on an at mega with a bootloader and maybe on some kind of specific board with funny connectors.

If you mean runs on a cortexM4 with 8megs of flash, say it I'm sure many people will understand. And doing AI (inference) on such boards has been done and demonstrated a few years ago and is still cool.

You know what ? I could play super Mario Wii u on a cortex m4 .. of course it was tongue in cheek as I was playing a video of the game on a cortex m4 plugged into a VGA screen. But technically I was right, my point being you can be right, and misleading.

cr0sh• 7 years ago

"Arduino" is the company

I'd argue it's more the "ecosystem" today, rather than just the organization/company (or the "board").

In many cases, if you want your microcontroller to gain wide acceptance in the hobbyist community (if you're targeting it), you have to provide a "core" or something similar for the official IDE.

At one time, "arduino" meant "ATMega168/328 carrier board loved by hobbyists and despised by everyone else" - but those days are long, long past.

In fact - I think there's a core available for the SoC on the Raspberry Pi - ah (well, something):

https://github.com/me-no-dev/RasPiArduino

kbumsik• 7 years ago

The Arduino has 2 KB of RAM

That is Arduino "Uno", not Arduino itself. Arduino now refers a platform and an ecosystem for quick microcontroller prototyping. Almost every popular microcontrollers has arduino API support (either officially or by community).

So the term "Arduino" sounds as "microcontrollers" to me.

kahnjw• 7 years ago

You could run a smallish linear model on 2kb easily. Definitely not a deep net though.

mslip• 7 years ago

You know the make arduinos with cortex processor right? Arduino primo, blue fruit nrf52,...

mrighele• 7 years ago

What does a Cortex have to do with the Arduino?

Note that they don't say THE Arduino but AN Arduino. What you're thinking about is probably the Arduino Uno which is the original model.

These days Arduino is a platform made up by a common software (IDE, libraries etc) and a family of products that employ different microcontrollers (Different AtMegas but also Cortex processors), different form size (from the original "big" size to the small Arduino Nano) different amount of memories and different extras.

For example Arduino MKR1000 is AN Arduino employing a 32bit SAMD21 Cortex-M0+

raxxorrax• 7 years ago

There are Arduinos with Cortex processors. I think they have around 196kb RAM, yay!

It could be enough to perhaps implement a very rudimentary voice recognition, which could indeed be interesting for these low cost devices. And if it is just about being activated by a specific key word.

Speaking of machine learning is perhaps a bit much, but isn't it the same in other applications?

canada_dry• 7 years ago

Take this for what it is... an interesting exercise in what's possible - not necessarily practical.

I'm a big fan of everything Lady Adafruit does. She has been and continues to be a huge contributor to the IoT ecosystem and OSS ever since she started her little shop 15 years ago.

H8crilA• 7 years ago

It's not little now. Had $45 million in yearly revenues and over a 100 employees already in 2016.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adafruit_Industries

adrianN• 7 years ago

The kind of AI we can squeeze into a US $30 or $40 system won’t beat anyone at Go, but it opens the door to applications we might never even imagine otherwise.

I wonder whether it can beat professionals at chess. Last time I checked (a few years ago), software running on ordinary smartphones reached really high ELO. The improvements since Deep Blue are really impressive.

nicolas_wang• 7 years ago

I once tried yolo3 on rpi3 to get less than 1fps performance. To me it’s not acceptable. Will have to try rpi4.

ajcarpy2005• 7 years ago

Does anyone know if I could do facial recognition reliably with an Arduino?

kortex• 7 years ago

You could probably do something crude on an M4. Here's a fairly performant face detector in tensorflow: https://github.com/iitzco/faced

You'd probably need to roll your own lightweight face vectorizer though.

Machine Learning That’s Light Enough for an Arduino

Related Stories