HackSpace – September 2019

SparkFun Edge

REVIEW

SparkFun Edge

@ben_everard

Artificial intelligence stripped bare

t the moment, artificial

intelligence is in a transitionary

phase where words have different

meanings to different people.

No one’s lying; it’s just that the AI

world hasn’t quite decided how to

describe the various aspects of embedded AI. For

starters, what is the Edge? Very briefly, it refers to

AI that happens on a device itself. The easiest way

to understand this is to look at the alternative: for

example, the way most popular voice assistants

work. When you speak to them, they upload the

By Ben Everard

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SPARKFUN $14.95 sparkfun.com

audio to some cloud service and that cloud service

works out what you’re saying, what this means,

and sends the commands back to the device. This

has a few disadvantages – it requires a permanent

connection to the internet, it sends quite a lot of

data back and forth, and it requires cloud servers

to be kept running in order for it to operate.

Edge computing is the opposite of this. It means

that some level of AI is running directly on the

device doing the sensing. So far, it all seems fairly

straightforward. Where it all seems to break down

is what people expect these edge devices to be.

Last month we looked at Raspberry Pi 4 as an edge

device – and it is. It can do some powerful AI while

still being cost-effective and low power (at least when

compared to a traditional computer). The SparkFun

Edge, however, is an order of magnitude smaller

than this. It features an ultra-low-power ARM M4

core, a couple of microphones, and just enough

other components to keep everything running.

People will argue about which of these is the

‘true’ edge, but semantics need not bother us. They

both have niches in AI that they fill well, and we can

just look at what is the best device for our needs.

LIVIN’ ON THE EDGE

We’ll start with the issues with the SparkFun Edge.

First is that it’s not particularly easy to program. You’ll

need a USB to UART cable, and it’s programmed via

a downloadable SDK. This is pretty much par for the

course with many commercial dev boards, but anyone

used to the Arduino IDE, or similar things, will find it

a bit of a shock. That said, it’s well documented; so

as long as you’re comfortable using the command

line, you should make it through unscathed.