HackSpace – September 2019

(Wang) #1

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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Below
At 4 cm by 4 cm,
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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.
Free download pdf