AI on Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a series of small single-board computers developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation to promote the teaching of basic computer science in schools and in developing countries.

The original model became far more popular than anticipated, selling outside its target market for uses such as robotics. It does not include peripherals (such as keyboards, mice and cases).

However, some accessories have been included in several official and unofficial bundles. It is a capable little device that enables people of all ages to explore computing, and to learn how to program in languages like Scratch and Python.

Now, the latest version of TensorFlow can now be run on the Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi is used by many innovative developers, and is also widely used in education to introduce people to programming, so making TensorFlow easier to install will help open up machine learning to new audiences.

Google TensorFlow is a powerful open-source software framework used to power AI projects around the globe. It is used for machine learning and the creation of neural networks. These make it possible for computers to perform increasingly complex tasks, such as image recognition and text analysis.

When it comes to AI, most people think of powerful supercomputers crunching billions of numbers in giant databanks. But there are two parts to machine learning.

There is a train/test part, where you use a lot of data to build a model. And there’s deployment, where you take a model and use it as part of a project. And that’s where the Raspberry Pi fits in.

“Thanks to a collaboration with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we’re now happy to say that the latest 1.9 release of TensorFlow can be installed from pre-built binaries using Python’s pip package system,” according to a blog post written by Pete Warden, an engineer working on the TensorFlow team at Google.

It’s pretty easy to install if you’ve got a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian 9.0 and either Python 2.7 or anything newer than Python 3.4. After that it’s only a few simple lines of code, and you're done.

Here you can find a quick overview on how to install it, it also includes some troubleshooting advice just in case you run into some problems.

This guide explains how to install TensorFlow on a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian. Although these instructions might also work on other Pi variants, the TensorFlow's team have only tested (and only support) these instructions on machines meeting the following requirements:

• Raspberry Pi devices running Raspbian 9.0 or higher

According to the Raspberry Pi Foundation, over 5 million Raspberry Pis were sold by February 2015, making it the best-selling British computer. By November 2016 they had sold 11 million units, and 12.5m by March 2017, making it the third best-selling "general purpose computer". In July 2017, sales reached nearly 15 million. In March 2018, sales reached 19 million.

We’ve already seen platforms like DonkeyCar use TensorFlow and the Raspberry Pi to create self-driving toy cars, and we can’t wait to discover what new projects will be built now that they’ve reduced the difficulty.

During the next days I will be installing TF on one of my Rasperry PIs and porting some of my AI projects, specially those one related to Facial and Object Recognition to run directly on it. And of course I will share it with you here.

See you next time,

Jair Ribeiro