LILYGO Launches a Dual-Microcontroller Edge AI Smart Camera Slash Tiny Autonomous Car
With an Espressif ESP32 and a Kendryte K210 on board, this tiny camera can wander around your desk on-command.
Embedded and hobbyist electronics specialist LILYGO has launched a dual-microcontroller development board with a difference: it's a smart camera that can also drive around your desk, thanks to a pair of motorized wheels underneath.
The LILYGO T-Bao is, on the face of it, a compact smart camera for edge artificial intelligence (edge AI) and computer vision work. Powered by a Kendryte K210 dual-core 64-bit RISC-V microcontroller runningat up to 400MHz and with a Kendryte Processing Unit (KPU) neural network coprocessor for energy-efficient machine learning. There's 6MB of static RAM (SRAM) on-board, with a further 2MB dedicated to the KPU.
The K210 microcontroller on this compact smart camera board, brought to our attention by Linux Gizmos, is connected to an Omnivision 0V2640 two-megapixel rolling-shutter camera and a 1.54" IPS capacitive touch display with a 240×240 resolution. The board runs the FreeRTOS real-time operating system, and comes equipped with a face recognition model that uses the KPU to run at 60 frames per second (FPS) in QVGA resolution or 30 FPS in VGA.
Oddly, though, that's not the end of the story. The board also includes a TDK InvenSense MPU-6050 six-axis inertial measurement unit (IMU), which links in to its second feature: the ability to operate as a compact autonomous or remote-control vehicle. A Texas Instruments DRV8833 motor driver is linked to two motors, driving small wheels on the two-part body's lower half — with castors provided for stability.
To finish off the feature set is a second microcontroller, an Espressif ESP32-D0WDQ6-V3 module with dual 32-bit Tensilica Xtensa LX6 cores running at up to 240MHz, 8MB of pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM), and 16MB of flash storage. This handles connectivity, delivering IEEE 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2 Low Energy (BLE). Finally, there's an X-Powers AXP202 power management unit accessible on the same I2C bus as the IMU.
The T-Bao is now available to order on the LILYGO store at $80.69; the face tracking demo is available on GitHub under an unspecified license.