Intro to Machine learning on Microcontrollers:
Machine Learning -- TinyML & Seeed Studios Wio Terminal
TinyML -- Seeed Wio Terminal -- ItsyBitsy Machine Learning...Lets GOoOo
So if you don't already know I do a lot of tinkering with microcontrollers. A microcontroller is essentially a small simple SOC -- System On Chip -- or very similar to the CPU's in all mobile devices now days. Although they tend to be much simpler and are usually designed with specific use cases. Here's the textbook definition:
In modern terminology, a microcontroller is similar to, but less sophisticated than, a system on a chip (SoC). An SoC may include a microcontroller as one of its components, but usually integrates it with advanced peripherals like a graphics processing unit (GPU), a Wi-Fi module, or one or more coprocessors. Microcontrollers are used in automatically controlled products and devices, such as automobile engine control systems, implantable medical devices, remote controls, office machines, appliances, power tools, toys and other embedded systems.
I recently got a new device called the Wio Terminal its very fast feature rich device with a plethora of sensors:
- MCU, LCD, WIFI, BT, IMU, Microphone, Buzzer, microSD Card, Configurable Buttons, Light Sensor, 5-Way Switch, Infrared Emitter (IR 940nm), Crypto-authentication Ready
It also runs one of the fastest processing units (ATSAMD51), which when you see the specs you may compare them to a good mobile or a CPU you'd find in most laptops and desktops and see that the microcontroller appears to be extremely lacking in speed & memory but the microcontroller has that huge variety of sensors and peripherals tied directly to the processor, meaning there is much much less overhead for the processor on a microcontroller unit to do the SPECIFC tasks the sensors and unit were designed for. It will do them fast but most importantly do them extremely reliably with an absolutely tiny amount of power.
A similar micro can run on a small battery pack about equal to that of a cell phone battery (3600mAh) for about 12 days, if its configured to go into deep sleep mode between the timers set to receive weather data from its sensors. For connectivity this particular unit has THE best mobile designed Wifi/Bluetooth chips available the Realtek RTL8720DN.
All this to say as a platform to build a microcontroller based project off of the Wio Terminal comes with every bit of hardware you could want or need. This project in particular is a Machine Learning project, so I'm going to be following this course for the first time ever. Although I do have some experience with Googles CoLab which similarly has some AI & Machine learning walkthroughs but the devices you rent and use for those courses are extremely powerful enterprise level cloud servers. So these projects while alike in name could not be more different. The Wio Terminal costs about 30-45$ on amazon I got mine for 24$ on sale a few weeks ago, so jump on amazon (42$) if you want it fast, if you want it for cheap (29$) on Seeed Studios store website. Then we can do this together! I'm going to drop the PDF's below off our classes MEGA server, same one I setup and shared that contain all the slides.
Seeed Studio Wio Terminal TinyML Courses The intro courses will teach us how to create Machine Learning projects of varying applications :
- Autonomous vehicles: Neural networks can be used to detect obstacles in the environment and make decisions about how to avoid them.
- Home security: Neural networks can be used to identify people and objects in videos captured by home security cameras.
- Healthcare: Algorithms can be used to detect anomalies in medical images or to predict the risk of diseases.
- Industrial IoT: Neural networks can be used to classify different types of data from industrial sensors.
- Retail: Neural networks can be used to identify items in images of merchandise and to recommend products to customers.
Device : Amazon Photos
My First Project Wio Terminal : Full Spectrum WiFi Visual Analyzer
