Embedded World Attendees Spot Unannounced Raspberry Pi Monitor, AI Camera Products
With no official announcement yet made, pricing and availability for both have yet to be confirmed.
Raspberry Pi fans attending Embedded World 2024 in Nuremberg this week have been treated to previews of not one but two as-yet unannounced products: an official 15.6" monitor with built-in audio and an edge artificial intelligence (edge AI) camera module designed to offload the computational effort from the host device.
Reader Tam Hanna, who visited the Raspberry Pi booth at Embedded World yesterday, got in touch to alert us to the Raspberry Pi AI Camera — a device that the company has not yet announced outside the event, but which appears to be retail-ready to the point of having packaging designed and produced. Built around the Sony IMX500 sensor, the Raspberry Pi AI Camera Module runs computer vision models on the sensor itself — meaning it can be paired with a low-power device, like the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, and perform real-time image analysis without bogging down the host processor.
In his video, embedded above, Hanna showed a live demo of the new module connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W single-board computer performing object classification at 30 frames per second, using the MobileNet machine vision model — which, signage at the event says, will come pre-loaded on the device, though that can be replaced by the user's own TensorFlow models for other tasks including pose estimation as demonstrated on a second device.
The Sony IMX500 is a 12-megapixel sensor that was announced by the company back in May 2020, though the demonstration appeared to be running on a 1080p video feed, and offers a 76-degree field of view with a manual-focus lens — not easily replaced, unlike the Raspberry Pi HQ Camera Module range. The module itself will come with a 200mm connection cable compatible with "all Raspberry Pi computers," event signage says — not including models, like the Raspberry Pi 400, which lack a MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) connector.
Attendee Bret Weber, meanwhile, has drawn attention to a second unannounced device on the same booth: the Raspberry Pi 15.6" Monitor. Seemingly designed as a larger alternative to the company's touchscreen display accessories, the non-touch IPS monitor has a 1080p60 resolution with a single HDMI connector, amplified stereo speakers and a 3.5mm jack for headphones — possibly to mollify those who mourn the loss of the analog audio jack on the Raspberry Pi 5 — and a USB Type-C cable for power.
At the time of writing, though, Raspberry Pi had made no official announcement of either product on its usual communication channels — leaving pricing and availability for both up in the air.
Main article image courtesy of Tam Hanna.