Connect a camera to the Dev Board Mini

To perform real-time inferencing with a vision model, you can connect the Dev Board Mini to the Coral Camera.

Once you connect your camera, try the demo scripts below.

Connect the Coral Camera

The Coral Camera connects to the CSI connector on the top of the Dev Board Mini.

You can connect the camera to the Dev Board Mini as follows:

1. Make sure the board is powered off and unplugged.

2. On the top of the Dev Board Mini, locate the "Camera" connector and flip the small black latch so it's facing upward, as shown in figure 1.

   

3. Slide the flex cable into the connector with the contact pins facing toward the board (the blue strip is facing away from the board), as shown in figure 2.

4. Close the black latch.

   

5. Likewise, ensure that the other end is secured on the camera module.

   

6. Power on the board and verify it detects the camera by running this command:

   v4l2-ctl --list-devices

   You should see the camera listed as /dev/video1:

   platform:mt8167 (platform:mt8167):
           /dev/video0
           /dev/video1
   
   14001000.rdma (platform:mt8173):
           /dev/video2

   Note: Even when the camera is not connected, you will see video0 and video2 listed, because they represent the MediaTek SoC's video decoder and scaler/converter, respectively.

For a quick camera test, connect to the board's shell terminal and run the snapshot tool:

snapshot

If you have a monitor attached to the board, you'll see the live camera feed.

You can press Spacebar to save an image to the home directory.

Run a demo with the camera

The Mendel system image on the Dev Board Mini includes two demos that perform real-time image classification and object detection.

First, connect a monitor to the board's micro HDMI port so you can see the video results.

Then log on to the board (using MDT or the serial console) and run these commands to be sure you have the latest software:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Download the model files

Before you run either demo, you'll need to download the model files on your board.

First, set this environment variable:

export DEMO_FILES="$HOME/demo_files"

Then download the following files on your board (be sure you're connected to the internet):

# The image classification model and labels file
wget -P ${DEMO_FILES}/ https://github.com/google-coral/test_data/raw/master/mobilenet_v2_1.0_224_quant_edgetpu.tflite

wget -P ${DEMO_FILES}/ https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google-coral/test_data/release-frogfish/imagenet_labels.txt

# The face detection model (does not require a labels file)
wget -P ${DEMO_FILES}/ https://github.com/google-coral/test_data/raw/master/ssd_mobilenet_v2_face_quant_postprocess_edgetpu.tflite

Run a classification model

This demo classifies 1,000 different objects shown to the camera:

edgetpu_classify \
--model ${DEMO_FILES}/mobilenet_v2_1.0_224_quant_edgetpu.tflite \
--labels ${DEMO_FILES}/imagenet_labels.txt

Run a face detection model

This demo draws a box around any detected human faces:

edgetpu_detect \
--model ${DEMO_FILES}/ssd_mobilenet_v2_face_quant_postprocess_edgetpu.tflite

Try other example code

We have several other examples that are compatible with almost any camera and any Coral device with an Edge TPU (including the Dev Board). They each show how to stream images from a camera and run classification or detection models . Each example uses a different camera library, such as GStreamer, OpenCV, and PyGame.

To explore the code and run them, see the instructions at github.com/google-coral/examples-camera.