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.

Gareth Halfacree
1 year ago β€’ HW101 / Machine Learning & AI

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.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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