Tag Archives: Google Coral

New Coral products for 2020

Posted by Billy Rutledge, Director Google Research, Coral Team

More and more industries are beginning to recognize the value of local AI, where the speed of local inference allows considerable savings on bandwidth and cloud compute costs, and keeping data local preserves user privacy.

Last year, we launched Coral, our platform of hardware components and software tools that make it easy to prototype and scale local AI products. Our product portfolio includes the Coral Dev Board, USB Accelerator, and PCIe Accelerators, all now available in 36 countries.

Since our release, we’ve been excited by the diverse range of applications already built on Coral across a broad set of industries that range from healthcare to agriculture to smart cities. And for 2020, we’re excited to announce new additions to the Coral platform that will expand the possibilities even further.

First up is the Coral Accelerator Module, an easy to integrate multi-chip package that encapsulates the Edge TPU ASIC. The module exposes both PCIe and USB interfaces and can easily integrate into custom PCB designs. We’ve been working closely with Murata to produce the module and you can see a demo at CES 2020 by visiting their booth at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Tech East, Central Plaza, CP-18. The Coral Accelerator Module will be available in the first half of 2020.

Coral Accelerator Module, a new multi-chip module with Google Edge TPU

Coral Accelerator Module, a new multi-chip module with Google Edge TPU

Next, we’re announcing the Coral Dev Board Mini, which provides a smaller form-factor, lower-power, and lower-cost alternative to the Coral Dev Board. The Mini combines the new Coral Accelerator Module with the MediaTek 8167s SoC to create a board that excels at 720P video encoding/decoding and computer vision use cases. The board will be on display during CES 2020 at the MediaTek showcase located in the Venetian, Tech West, Level 3. The Coral Dev Board Mini will be available in the first half of 2020.

We're also offering new variations to the Coral System-on-Module, now available with 2GB and 4GB LPDDR4 RAM in addition to the original 1GB LPDDR4 configuration. We’ll be showcasing how the SoM can be used in smart city, manufacturing, and healthcare applications, as well as a few new SoC and MCU explorations we’ve been working on with the NXP team at CES 2020 in their pavilion located at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Tech East, Central Plaza, CP-18.

Finally, Asus has chosen the Coral SOM as the base to their Tinker Edge T product, a maker friendly single-board computer that features a rich set of I/O interfaces, multiple camera connectors, programmable LEDs, and color-coded GPIO header. The Tinker Edge T board will be available soon -- more details can be found here from Asus.

Come visit Coral at CES Jan 7-10 in Las Vegas:

  • NXP exhibit (LVCC, Tech East, Central Plaza, CP-18)
  • Mediatek exhibit (Venetian, Tech West, Level 3)
  • Murata exhibit (LVCC, South Hall 2, MP26061)

And, as always, we are always looking for ways to improve the platform, so keep reaching out to us at [email protected].

Coral updates: Project tutorials, a downloadable compiler, and a new distributor

Posted by Vikram Tank (Product Manager), Coral Team

coral hardware

We’re committed to evolving Coral to make it even easier to build systems with on-device AI. Our team is constantly working on new product features, and content that helps ML practitioners, engineers, and prototypers create the next generation of hardware.

To improve our toolchain, we're making the Edge TPU Compiler available to users as a downloadable binary. The binary works on Debian-based Linux systems, allowing for better integration into custom workflows. Instructions on downloading and using the binary are on the Coral site.

We’re also adding a new section to the Coral site that showcases example projects you can build with your Coral board. For instance, Teachable Machine is a project that guides you through building a machine that can quickly learn to recognize new objects by re-training a vision classification model directly on your device. Minigo shows you how to create an implementation of AlphaGo Zero and run it on the Coral Dev Board or USB Accelerator.

Our distributor network is growing as well: Arrow will soon sell Coral products.

Updates from Coral: A new compiler and much more

Posted by Vikram Tank (Product Manager), Coral Team

Coral has been public for about a month now, and we’ve heard some great feedback about our products. As we evolve the Coral platform, we’re making our products easier to use and exposing more powerful tools for building devices with on-device AI.

Today, we're updating the Edge TPU model compiler to remove the restrictions around specific architectures, allowing you to submit any model architecture that you want. This greatly increases the variety of models that you can run on the Coral platform. Just be sure to review the TensorFlow ops supported on Edge TPU and model design requirements to take full advantage of the Edge TPU at runtime.

We're also releasing a new version of Mendel OS (3.0 Chef) for the Dev Board with a new board management tool called Mendel Development Tool (MDT).

To help with the developer workflow, our new C++ API works with the TensorFlow Lite C++ API so you can execute inferences on an Edge TPU. In addition, both the Python and C++ APIs now allow you to run multiple models in parallel, using multiple Edge TPU devices.

In addition to these updates, we’re adding new capabilities to Coral with the release of the Environmental Sensor Board. It’s an accessory board for the Coral Dev Platform (and Raspberry Pi) that brings sensor input to your models. It has integrated light, temperature, humidity, and barometric sensors, and the ability to add more sensors via it's four Grove connectors. The secure element on-board also allows for easy communication with the Google Cloud IOT Core.

The team has also been working with partners to help them evaluate whether Coral is the right fit for their products. We’re excited that Oivi has chosen us to be the base platform of their new handheld AI-camera. This product will help prevent blindness among diabetes patients by providing early, automated detection of diabetic retinopathy. Anders Eikenes, CEO of Oivi, says “Oivi is dedicated towards providing patient-centric eye care for everyone - including emerging markets. We were honoured to be selected by Google to participate in their Coral alpha program, and are looking forward to our continued cooperation. The Coral platform gives us the ability to run our screening ML models inside a handheld device; greatly expanding the access and ease of diabetic retinopathy screening.”

Finally, we’re expanding our distributor network to make it easier to get Coral boards into your hands around the world. This month, Seeed and NXP will begin to sell Coral products, in addition to Mouser.

We're excited to keep evolving the Coral platform, please keep sending us feedback at [email protected].

You can see the full release notes on Coral site.

Introducing Coral: Our platform for development with local AI

Posted by Billy Rutledge (Director) and Vikram Tank (Product Mgr), Coral Team

AI can be beneficial for everyone, especially when we all explore, learn, and build together. To that end, Google's been developing tools like TensorFlow and AutoML to ensure that everyone has access to build with AI. Today, we're expanding the ways that people can build out their ideas and products by introducing Coral into public beta.

Coral is a platform for building intelligent devices with local AI.

Coral offers a complete local AI toolkit that makes it easy to grow your ideas from prototype to production. It includes hardware components, software tools, and content that help you create, train and run neural networks (NNs) locally, on your device. Because we focus on accelerating NN's locally, our products offer speedy neural network performance and increased privacy — all in power-efficient packages. To help you bring your ideas to market, Coral components are designed for fast prototyping and easy scaling to production lines.

Our first hardware components feature the new Edge TPU, a small ASIC designed by Google that provides high-performance ML inferencing for low-power devices. For example, it can execute state-of-the-art mobile vision models such as MobileNet V2 at 100+ fps, in a power efficient manner.

Coral Camera Module, Dev Board and USB Accelerator

For new product development, the Coral Dev Board is a fully integrated system designed as a system on module (SoM) attached to a carrier board. The SoM brings the powerful NXP iMX8M SoC together with our Edge TPU coprocessor (as well as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, RAM, and eMMC memory). To make prototyping computer vision applications easier, we also offer a Camera that connects to the Dev Board over a MIPI interface.

To add the Edge TPU to an existing design, the Coral USB Accelerator allows for easy integration into any Linux system (including Raspberry Pi boards) over USB 2.0 and 3.0. PCIe versions are coming soon, and will snap into M.2 or mini-PCIe expansion slots.

When you're ready to scale to production we offer the SOM from the Dev Board and PCIe versions of the Accelerator for volume purchase. To further support your integrations, we'll be releasing the baseboard schematics for those who want to build custom carrier boards.

Our software tools are based around TensorFlow and TensorFlow Lite. TF Lite models must be quantized and then compiled with our toolchain to run directly on the Edge TPU. To help get you started, we're sharing over a dozen pre-trained, pre-compiled models that work with Coral boards out of the box, as well as software tools to let you re-train them.

For those building connected devices with Coral, our products can be used with Google Cloud IoT. Google Cloud IoT combines cloud services with an on-device software stack to allow for managed edge computing with machine learning capabilities.

Coral products are available today, along with product documentation, datasheets and sample code at g.co/coral. We hope you try our products during this public beta, and look forward to sharing more with you at our official launch.