Maxlab Unveils Its Tokay Lite Smart Camera Successor, Targeting AI Vision Projects: Tokay Pro

Canadian computer vision specialist Maxlab has announced a successor to 2023's Tokay Lite camera development board, swapping out the original's Espressif ESP32-S3 for a more powerful NXP Semiconductors i.MX 8M Plus chip on a Variscite DART-MX8M-PLUS system-on-module (SOM).

"Over the last year, we have been working on bringing up the Tokay Pro advanced camera," the company says of the new board. "This camera [developer board] allows connecting up to three different sensors (video, thermal, and spectral, for example) for the most ambitious projects. The camera can detect and track multiple objects in a single frame while running high-performance computer vision models. While Tokay Lite is optimized for ultra-low power usage, the next iteration of our devkits focuses on high performance."

The new Tokay Pro, brought to our attention by Linux Gizmos, is designed as a more powerful successor Maxlab's Tokay Lite, unveiled on Crowd Supply back in 2023. Back then, the company was using an Espressif ESP32-S3 microcontroller with two 32-bit Tensilica Xtensa LX7 cores running at up to 240MHz, 512kB of static RAM, and 8MB of pseudo-static RAM. The new Tokay Pro, by contrast, comes with considerably beefier specs, thanks to a Variscite DART-MX8M-PLUS system-on-module (SOM) on its upper side.

The Variscite SOM is built around the NXP i.MX 8M Plus, which has four 64-bit Arm Cortex-A53 processor cores running at 800MHz, down from the part's 1.8GHz maximum, a Cortex-M7 coprocessor running at up to 800MHz, and a neural coprocessor delivering a claimed 2.3 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of minimum-precision compute for on-board machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) workloads. This is on top of 2GB of RAM and 4GB of eMMC storage, Vivanti GC520L 2D and GC7000UL 3D graphics accelerators, a Tensilica HiFi 4 digital signal processor (DSP), 1080p60 H.264/H.265 encoding and H.264/H.264/VP8/VP9 decoding in hardware, and an image signal processor capable of handling up to 375 megapixels of camera data. The carrier board, meanwhile, includes microphone and passive infrared (PIR) motion sensor.

"Our camera supports multiple sensors," Maxlab explains of how that functionality is brought out on the Tokay Pro itself, "and we can attach up to three different sensors simultaneously on the device. What it means is our camera can support thermal, spectral, 3D, or visible spectrum sensors at the same time. The default option is [a Sony] IMX219 [eight-megapixel sensor], but it can be easily replaced with any other module, as long as it supports a Raspberry Pi camera connector."

More information is available on the Maxlab website, where it is currently accepting orders — though the price had not been disclosed publicly at the time of writing.