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SparkFun Releases 'Super' Low-Power Edge Board for Voice, Gesture Recognition
Boulder, Colo.-based SparkFun Electronics on Monday announced the release of the SparkFun Edge, a new development board that the company says it created the board combination with Google's TensorFlow team specifically for artificial intelligence on the edge that focuses on gesture and voice recognition.
The board features Ambiq's recently released Apollo 3 system on a chip (SoC) with a Cortex M4 processor, 384KB of RAM and 1MB flash storage, which the company says lets the SparkFun Edge "run for several days on a coin cell battery."
According to the announcement, the chip runs TensorFlow Lite "using only 6uA/MHz."
"We wanted to show examples of TensorFlow running on embedded systems at a super-low power -- we needed a tool to do that," commented Google Engineer Peter Warden in a prepared statement. "We talked with SparkFun and Ambiq and now we are able to share this device with the world."
Developers get access to the various sensors on the chip, Bluetooth, microphones, accelerometer and camera connector. Full specs can be found on the product page, linked above.
The software for the SparkFun Edge is open source, and can be found on GitHub here.
More information on ordering the SparkFun Edge developer boardcan be found here. Its list price as of publication of this article was $14.95.
About the Author
Becky Nagel is vice president of AI for 1105 Media, where she specializes in training internal and external customers on maximizing their business potential via a wide variety of generative AI technologies as well as developing cutting-edge AI content and events. She's the author of "ChatGPT Prompt 101 Guide for Business Uses," regularly leads research studies on generative AI business usage, and serves as the director of AI Boardroom, a new resource for C-level executives looking to excel in the AI era. Prior to her current position she was a technical leader for 1105 Media's Web, advertising and production teams as well as editorial director for a suite of enterprise technology publications, including serving as founding editor of PureAI.com. She has 20 years of enterprise technology journalism experience, and regularly speaks and writes about generative AI, AI, edge computing and other cutting-edge technologies. She can be reached at bnagel@1105media.com.