Raspberry Pi, a business that sells tiny, cheap single-board computers, is putting out an add-on that will make their computers more beneficial in several ways
And yes, there is an AI angle because it’s 2024. This picture camera will cost $70 and is called the Raspberry Pi AI Camera. It has AI processing built right in.
A Sony image sensor called the IMX500 works with the AI Camera. It is paired with a Raspberry Pi’s microprocessor chip called the RP2040, which has SRAM built into it. The RP2040, like the rest of the line-up, uses Raspberry Pi’s central idea: it is cheap and works well.
AI companies won’t switch from Nvidia GPUs to RP2040 chips for inference. But when you connect it to an image sensor, you get an extra module that can take pictures and use standard neural network models to process them.
As a bonus, the camera module does its processing, so visual data processing doesn’t affect the host Raspberry Pi. You don’t have to add a different accelerator for the Raspberry Pi to keep doing other things. This new gadget works with all Raspberry Pi computers.
This is not the first camera gadget for Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 is still for sale. It has a simple Sony IMX708 12-megapixel image sensor mounted on a small add-on board. You can connect it to a Raspberry Pi with a ribbon wire. The Camera Module 3 will still be available for about $25 because Raspberry Pi says they will keep making them for a long time.
The AI Camera is the same size as the Camera Module 3 (25 mm x 24 mm), but the optical sensor makes it slightly more prominent. The MobileNet-SSD model is already on it. This is an object recognition model that can run in real-time.
Your next question might be: Who will use the Raspberry Pi AI Camera? Raspberry Pi’s tiny computers were first made for tech enthusiasts and home lab projects. These days, most of the company’s sales go to businesses that use them in their goods or as part of their assembly lines for internal industrial use.
When Raspberry Pi went public, it said that 72% of its sales came from the industrial and embedded market. The AI Camera may have an even higher ratio.
The AI Camera module could be used by businesses to make smart city devices that, for example, find empty parking spots or watch how traffic moves. The hardware could be used for simple, automated quality control in an industrial setting by moving things under the camera module.
Companies like Raspberry Pi because it lets them make a lot of computers and modules. They had some supply problems after COVID-19, but those seem to be fixed now. Businesses know they can reliably get Raspberry Pi goods without waiting for production to slow down. Part of the reason Raspberry Pi says they will keep making the AI Camera until at least January 2028 is because of this.