Luckfox Launches an Ultra-Compact Linux-Capable Single-Board Computer with On-Device AI Smarts
With a 32-bit Arm Cortex-A7 and the pairing of a RISC-V microcontroller and a neural processor, this compact board aims for edge AI work.
Luckfox has launched an ultra-compact Linux-capable single-board computer family, almost as small as a coin, which delivers an application-class processor, dedicated neural-network coprocessor for on-device machine learning, and a low-power RISC-V microcontroller: the Luckfox Pico Mini range.
"This development board is suitable for applications in various scenarios," Luckfox claims of its compact single-board computer design, brought to our attention by Linux Gizmos, "including but not limited to: smart home devices; industrial automation equipment; robots and drones; intelligent monitoring devices; intelligent transportation equipment; smart medical devices."
The ultra-compact SBC is based on the Rockchip RV1103 system-on-chip, which gives it a single 32-bit Linux-capable Arm Cortex-A7 application-class processor running at up to 1.2GHz, a neural processing unit (NPU) on-device machine learning accelerator delivering a claimed 0.5 tera-operations per second (TOPS) with INT16, INT8, and INT4 support, and a low-power RISC-V microcontroller designed to offer a fast startup.
It's the RISC-V processor which is behind Luckfox's claim of "one second" facial recognition: the microcontroller is claimed to be able to capture an image from the board's image processor and a connected MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) in 250ms and load a facial recognition library into the NPU accelerator for fast facial recognition.
The board comes complete with 64MB of DDR2 memory and a microSD slot for storage, while a "Mini B" variant includes 128MB of on-board SPI NAND flash. 22 castellated pins are found around the board's edge, delivering 17 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins of which six support pulse-width modulation (PWM), one SPI bus, two successive-approximation analog to digital converters (SARDACs), and an Ethernet MAC PHY. There's also a USB Type-C connector for programming and power.
The Luckfox Pico Mini is now available on Waveshare's store, priced at $6.99 for the non-flash Mini A and $8.99 for the 128MB flash Mini B variant. More information on the boards, plus the Luckfox Pico, Pico Plus, Pico Pro, and Pico Max which complete the range, is available on the Luckfox wiki.