Hands on with the Coral USB Accelerator

Getting started with Google’s new Edge TPU hardware

I also go “Hands on with the Coral Dev Board” 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 Coral USB Accelerator.

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. I’ve already gotten hands on with the Coral Dev Board, but I also wanted to look at the new Coral USB Accelerator.

Opening the box

Much like the Coral Dev Board, the USB Accelerator comes in a small rather unprepossessing box. Mine was pre-production hardware, and the box came with sticker’ed up saying that “Marking and packaging not final,” which may well explain the AIY Projects branding on my USB Accelerator. Possibly the rebrand to Coral was only a…