Before starting on today’s story, I’d like to share the good news that our project is funded! Thank you, backers! You should also know that we’ve created a Discord for you to ask questions and share ideas. Please join us! https://discord.gg/k4unm4CN

Okay, now let’s talk about today’s topic of why we offer a pledge of EyeCloudAI CDK with the eMMC Expansion Board.

Some Project Background

No doubt, 2020 was a year worth mentioning in the history books as almost the whole world was locked down because of the Covid-19 pandemic. While we were isolated in the physical world, as gregarious creatures we virtually connected to each other with various internet tools. Video meetings started to penetrate our daily lives and we’ve become used to it for much online communication stuff.

To support and inspire more customizable and fantastical ideas, we had the plan to make an AiWebCam which would be plug-and-play with video meeting applications.

EyeCloudAI CDK is the development version of this AiWebCam, which is combined with a core board for AI computing and an eMMC Expansion Board for booting from local storage.

Technical Design Details

The isolated Core Board is designed to be integrated into other products with a host machine such as a PC, an ARM, a Raspberry Pi, and so on. This is because the Movidius Myriad X VPU does not store AI models, every time it is powered on, a host machine is required to load AI models to the Core Board for the Myriad X VPU inference.

Workflow of EyeCloudAI Core Board

However, when used for video meetings, loading AI models every time is a redundant step and webcam technology is the preferred type of camera. So we integrated AI Cam with a webcam, creating an AiWebCam solution.

Power-on Workflow of EyeCloudAI Core Board with eMMC Expanding Board

Demo

Okay, let me show you a demo of a face detection WebCam developed from EyeCloudAI CDK.

Here I have to mention that to change the AI models inside the eMMC Expansion Board, you have to upgrade the firmware of the EyeCloudAI CDK. Specifically, the AI model should be integrated into the firmware and then loaded to the EyeCloudAI CDK for upgrading.

Upgrading Workflow of EyeCloudAI Core Board with eMMC Expansion Board

Do you have any ideas for EyecloudAI projects? You are welcome to share them with us!