Sipeed Maix Amigo Brings Two Cameras, Touchscreen, and More in a $39 RISC-V-Powered Handheld Dev Kit
With a 400MHz dual-core RISC-V core and a Kendryte deep learning accelerator, this low-cost handheld gadget targets edge AI projects.
Seeed Studio has opened pre-order for a low-cost, all-in-one edge artificial intelligence (edge AI) and computer vision (CV) development unit, built atop the free and open source RISC-V instruction set architecture: the Sipeed Maix Amigo.
Sipeed has been releasing devices based on RISC-V cores at a rapid pace: Earlier this year the company launched the MaixCube all-in-one MicroPython development board, before that the MAIX Nano M.2-form-factor machine learning accelerator, and earlier still the Longan Nano and the original MAIX family. Its latest launch, though, really piles on the features by adding in not only a display but dual cameras, microphone, speaker, and on-board battery for truly untethered use.
The Maix Amigo is built around a Kendryte system-on-chip featuring a 400MHz — overclockable to 500MHz — RV64GC 64-bit dual-core RISC-V CPU with 8MB of static RAM (SRAM) and 16MB of flash memory, with a microSD slot for up to 128GB of additional storage. The front of the device is dominated by a 3.5" 320x480 capacitive touchscreen display and a VGA-resolution GC0328 camera capable of 30 frames per second; the rear, meanwhile, uses an OV7740 camera sensor with the same resolution but support for 60 frames per second.
Internally, the development board includes a 520mAh lithium battery which charges via a USB Type-C interface, there's an accelerometer, microphone, speaker with optional support for a larger external speaker, and a user-controllable RGB LED. Additional controls are available via a "game pad" controller plus three buttons to the opposite side, with expansion available via three SPMOD interfaces, three Grove connectors, or a USB Type-C On-The-Go (OTG) port.
On the software side, the Maix Amigo includes support for a custom MicroPython port dubbed MaixPy, PlatformIO, and the Arduino IDE, with examples provided in C and Python. Sipeed claims the board is ideally suited to edge AI and computer vision projects, including image classification, object detection, facial recognition, and speech recognition.
The Sipeed Maix Amigo is now available to pre-order, ahead of an August 27th launch date on Seeed Studio's store, priced at an impressively keen $39.