Turbocharge Your Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi AI Kit [1] consists of two components: a generic M.2 HAT+, an adaptor board that lets you connect any two M.2 modules (e.g., for NVMe storage) to the Raspberry Pi 5 and therefore directly to the PCI bus, and a Hailo-8L AI accelerator, which could also be installed on any other computer with an M.2 interface. This entry-level AI chip achieves a performance of 13 TOPS, which is half the number of tera-operations per second that you'd get with the standard Hailo-8 model.

As a first step, you need to assemble the system. Fit the four spacers, a GPIO extension connector, and a PCIe extension cable on the Raspberry Pi. Then slot the M.2 HAT+ onto the spacers and plug the ribbon cable into the connector on the HAT. Figure 1 shows the fully assembled, working system.

After restarting the Raspberry Pi, the Hailo board appears in the lspci output as shown in Listing 1. The second line reveals that the installation of the AI accelerator was successful.

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