Arducam's KingKong Pairs an OAK-SoM with a Raspberry Pi CM4 for an All-In-One Approach to Edge AI
With a global shutter sensor behind an M12 lens, the ironically-compact KingKong aims to be ready-to-run out of the box.
Computer vision specialist Arducam has announced the KingKong, an all-in-one edge artificial intelligence (edge) AI camera kit built around the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) and the Luxonis OAK-SoM — all housed in an aluminum enclosure that doubles as a passive heatsink.
"KingKong elevates the Raspberry Pi ecosystem with advanced vision AI capabilities, offering seamless integration and precise imaging," Arducam claims of its latest design. "With pre-installed software, demos, and versatile connectivity options including HDMI, GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output], USB ports, and Wi-Fi/Power-over-Ethernet, the Arducam KingKong offers plug-and-play ease for immediate engagement in AI programming projects. Additionally, with support for external trigger functionality, KingKong provides enhanced flexibility for precise and synchronized image acquisition."
The KingKong isn't the first time Arducam has paired the Luxonis OAK-SoM with a Raspberry Pi: back in January the company announced the PiNSIGHT, which connected the OAK-SoM and a Sony IMX708 12.3-megapixel camera sensor to a Raspberry Pi 5 — or, if peak performance isn't a concern, earlier models with the warning that anything from a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ down may offer a sub-optimal experience.
This time around the OAK-SoM BW1099, which offers a four tera-operations per second (TOPS) dedicated processor for edge AI and computer vision, is connected to a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and a lower-resolution but global-shutter onsemi AR0234CS color image sensor behind an M12 lens — designed to avoid the distortion present in rolling-shutter cameras when capturing rapid motion.
Key to Arducam's positioning of the KingKong is that it's an all-in-one solution for computer vision at the edge, and that extends beyond the hardware: the company says the devices will come pre-loaded with a software stack built around OpenCV and TensorFlow offering everything from simple video streaming to support for face recognition, fatigue detection, object recognition, anomaly detection, and pose estimation, among other computer vision workloads.
The company has opened pre-orders for the KingKong on the Arducam website at $399.99, with the first units expected to ship by the end of the month.