M5Stack Launches the UnitV K210 M12, an Interchangable-Lens Smart Camera Board for Edge AI Work

M5Stack has launched a new compact camera board for edge AI vision processing work, featuring interchangeable M12 lenses and the Kendryte K210 RISC-V system-on-chip: the UnitV K210 M12.

"The UnitV M12 AI camera is very small," M5Stack says of its latest design. "It is suitable for embedding in various devices, with machine vision processing capabilities, supporting a variety of image recognition capabilities (such as real-time acquisition of the size and coordinates of the detected target, teal-time acquisition of the type of detected target), and it can perform convolutional neural network calculations, which is a low-threshold machine vision embedded solution."

The new UnitV K210 M12, brought to our attention by Linux Gizmos, is based on the same interchangeable lens system as the UnitV M12 M5Stack launched back in October 2021, but as the name implies it uses very different hardware. Where the UnitV2 M12 featured Arm-based Sigmastar SSD202D system-on-chip with two Cortex-A7 cores, its K210 equivalent uses the Kendryte K210 with two 64-bit RISC-V cores running at 400MHz alongside 8MB of static RAM (SRAM) and 16MB of on-board flash with microSD expansion.

While that may seem relatively sedate, particularly given the 1.2GHz clock speed of the Arm-based orignal, the Kendryte chip comes with an on-board neural network coprocessor designed to offer 0.8 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute in addition to the CPU's capabilities. The part offers double-precision floating-point units on each core, capable of operating independently, and accelerators for both AES encryption and SHA-256 hashing operations.

The camera module on the new board, meanwhile, is a low-resolution Omnivision OV7740, offering VGA captures at 30 frames per second rising to 60 at QVGA. This is placed behind a wide-angle lens, though alternatives are available: like the original UnitV M12, you can just pop out the bundled lens and insert any other M12-standard alternative.

The UnitV K210 M12 is now available to order on the M5Stack store for $39.90 plus shipping.