Earlier this year, Seeed Studio introduced Wio Terminal a portable Arduino devkit with an LCD display, and expansion connectors and headers.
The company is now selling a similar looking devkit but for different applications with Sipeed Maix Amigo portable 64-bit RISC-V development kit powered by Kendryte K210 RISC-V AI processor and equipped with an LCD display, two cameras, a few buttons, and several I/O headers and Grove connectors.
Sipeed Maix Amigo specifications:
- SoC – Kendryte K210 Dual-core 64-bit RISC-V (RV64GC) processor with FPU @ 400 MHz (overclockable to 500MHz), 8MB SRAM, built-in AI accelerators for video and audio
- Storage – 16MB Flash, MicroSD card slot up
- Display – 3.5-inch TFT capacitive touch screen display with 480×320 resolution
- Camera
- VGA front-facing camera up to 30 fps (GC0328 sensor)
- VGA rear camera up to 60 fps (OV7740 sensor)
- Audio – Build-in microphone, optional 6-mic array
- USB – 1x USB Type-C port for power and programming
- Expansion
- 3x Grove ports with I2C, GPIO, etc…
- 3x 8-pin SP-MOD headers with GPIOs, 3.3V, and GND signals; compatible with ESP-01 ESP8266 WiFi module, PSRAM modules, etc…
- Sensor – Accelerometer
- Misc – Reset button, 3x function buttons, 3x LEDs
- Battery – 520 mAh Lithium battery
- Power Supply – Via USB-C port
- Dimensions – 104.3 x 63.3 x 16.5mm
The internal hardware looks very similar to Sipeed Maixduino board, except everything is nicely packaged together. As such, Sipeed Maix Amigo supports offline speech recognition, and MobileNetV1/V2, TinyYOLOv2, face recognition, ASR, etc. models, as well as popular deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow lite (recommended), ONNX, Baidu PaddlePaddle model conversion. Just like Maixduino, the development kit can be programmed with MaixPy (MicroPython) or the Arduino IDE. There’s no Wiki specific to Maix Agmigo, and instead, the company redirects people to the generic MaixPy documentation and Sipeed forums.
Seeed Studio is now taking pre-orders for Sipeed Maix Amigo for $39.90 plus shipping, with delivery scheduled to start on August 27th.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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I have an M5STICKV, which is a nice small device, but the small screen significantly limits the applications. I also bought a WIO Terminal hoping to eventually use it to replace my central heating controller, but the lack of battery makes it less attractive for week-end projects to start to familiarize with it. Thus this new one offering a large screen and a battery could be really interesting. I’m sure that the lack of WiFi will still be a problem for many use cases but that’s getting much much better!
we didn’t integrate wifi because different countries’ wireless certification is fussy, so we use 8pin ESP01 module instead, it is very common wifi module and you can buy every where
Does the “offline speech recognition” over the “6+1 microphone array” work out of the box, and which languages are included?
it is single mic for mandarin, and we will train for english soon
So the 1+6 mic in the specs mean there’s a built-in microphone, but people can add an optional 6-mic array?
Oh I’m not surprised and certainly understand the mess it can be, thanks for explaining! The only issue I’m seeing with adding an ESP01 is that it adds an external thick part. Likely proposing an internal slot to insert your tiny ESP8266-based serial transceiver module could have made a slightly nicer option. And even then, we’re still limited by the communication with the ESP at 921kbps (and its limited stack and lack of BT). Probably that another option could be that you’d propose wifi-less boards with a separate wifi module (the same as in the WIO terminal maybe since it… Read more »
You can get a battery for the Wio Terminal:
https://www.seeedstudio.com/Wio-Terminal-Chassis-Battery-p-4516.html
Yes indeed, thanks for the link. But that also soubles the thickness and weight of the whole device.
The Kendryte K210 seems to be a cool part, but their documentation for it is horrid.
I heard that the K210 shipments are very small, and production is about to be discontinued by kendryte. is that true?
Yes the documentation is a sad case. A year after launch they still haven’t fixes simple things like typos in the SDK for the OV7740 which will prevent new users without the skill to repair those libraries from even running the camera SDK examples.
where would one find caveats like this when starting with this processor?
It’s 2020, the Internet connected world, and this device is without connectivity. I don’t understand how you can produce an offline device in the age of IoT, this does not make sense to me.
And no, I don’t want to buy a perfectly packaged device and connect WiFi externally.