Hacker News Reader

For 10 USD you get an ESP32S3 board, which can do basic computer vision tasks. For example using OpenMV or emlearn-micropython. For 15-20 USD you can get a board that includes an OV2640 camera. Examples would be XIAO ESP32S3 Sense, LilyGo T Camera S3 or "ESP32-S3-CAM" board from misc manufacturers.

View on HN

yes that’s what i am working on these days but there is a need for a generally available neural chip (see google’s coral as one attempt). in my tests, esp32s3 is very very slow for any model with conv2d involved.

i just want a tiiiny gpu for $10 so i can run smaller models at higher speed than possible with xtensa/rp2040 having limited simd support etc.

Are you utilizing the SIMD and acceleration instructions in the S3? What kind of performance are you seeing?

Neural accelerators are coming into MCUs. The just released STM32N6 is probably among the best. Alif with the U55/U85 has been out for a little while. Maxim MAX78000 has a CNN accelerator out for a couple of years. More will come in the next few years - though not from Nvidia any time soon.

I'd love to hear more about your experience with Coral. Sounds like that'd be a good fit for a tiny GPU to run models with conv2d?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com