January 6, 2020

TL,DR; In this article you will learn how to create a budget AI Cloud that provides an Object Detection REST API with accelerated performance made possible by Google’s Coral EdgeTPU Technology. Scroll to the end of this article for a challenge!!

Ahhhh, the Cloud…

Image taken from www.teeshirtpalace.com

When creating a back end server application, we often think in terms of performance. While performance can be achieved by highly optimized software, the bottleneck are often caused by limited hardware capabilities. Adding AI into the mix, and we’re talking extreme power hungry mega-tron GPU(s) on top of your multi-extreme-core processors.

Now let us picture being able to setup your own personal, high performance AI Cloud server with just a single piece of plug-and-play USB hardware; drawing a peak current of about 900mA on maximum running capacity. Well, we can stop day dreaming now, because this is made possible by Google’s Coral EdgeTPU technology. The piece of hardware that we will check out for this tutorial is the Coral USB Accelerator. Let’s follow our imagination and build our own budget AI Cloud!!!

Coral USB Accelerator (image taken from coral.ai)

** Note that any of the Coral’s product can be used for this project, but I’m only featuring the Accelerator for the plug-and-play purpose of this tutorial.