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I sort of left the hobbyist electronics world back in 2018, and now everything seems to have an embedded Raspberry Pi in it. What's the best way to catch up? (self.askelectronics)

submitted 1 year ago by ch00f to c/[email protected]

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I'm an EE by trade focusing on embedded devices, but most of my work is in relatively low-power STM32 applications. When I stopped following developments in hobby kits, it was mostly Arduino Unos slowly driving I2C OLED displays.

Now suddenly, there are embedded Raspberry Pis and ESP32s doing realtime facial recognition and video feeds.

Is there a good place to look to catch up on what's now possible with these embedded devices?

Also, while I enjoy the ease of the hobby kits, I'm also interested in more mass-production-focused solutions.

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[–] agent_flounder 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You might want to check out OpenMV Cam which does some cool machine vision stuff and runs MicroPython.

I would probably start looking at OpenCV software for RasPi if you need more processing power.

I've been playing with ESP32 lately. I'm frankly kind of shocked at how well documented the API is and how well it all works. And it's mostly open. I haven't done anything with ESP32 Cams I bought, yet. No idea what is possible there or where to start.

Hopefully that helps.

Meanwhile I'm over here trying to wrap up a simple Bluetooth-enabled amp project for the last couple months lol. I should do more with machine vision.

[–] agent_flounder 3 points 1 year ago

PS: to me RPi is overkill for all but the most intense compute requirements. So is the esp32 to a lesser degree. Don't always need 240MHz dual core RISC with FreeRTOS and 2.4G radio...

I default to Arduino, usually attiny devices for simple, low power stuff. I am really liking the new TinyAVR line. Quicker programming, way more functionality, etc.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I've noticed that outside of the fixed use cases and their combination, it is surprisingly difficult to make ESP32 do something. For example, i wanted to crop and apply simple filters on videos being streamed from an ESP32 Cam. Should be doable for a setup that can do facial recognition and AI stuff, right? Clearly not without writing your own libraries.