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Hands on with the Coral Dev Board
Getting started with Google’s new Edge TPU hardware
I also go “Hands on with the Coral USB Accelerator” in a companion article.
At last year’s Google Next conference in San Francisco Google announced two new upcoming hardware products both built around Google’s Edge TPU, their purpose-built ASIC designed to run machine learning inferencing at the edge.
Both a development board and a USB Accelerator, with a form-factor along similar lines to the Intel’s Neural Compute Stick, were announced allowing users to run inferences of pre-trained TensorFlow Lite models locally on their own hardware.
The hardware is now available and has now launched into public Beta under the name Coral and, ahead of the launch, I managed to get my hands onto some early access hardware. While I go hands on with the USB Accelerator elsewhere, here I going to look at the Coral Dev Board.
Opening the box
The Coral Dev Board comes in a small rather unprepossessing box, which is not a bad thing. Not everything has to come in pretty Apple-like boxes, and these days it can be a bit of a red flag when it comes to manufacturing.
