I saw an interesting project on Hackster ultra96-skin-cancer-ai that uses the NCS with PYNQ on the Ultra96. I had just finished installing the NCS on the PYNQ-Z2 board Intel Movidius NCS on PYNQ-Z2 and it would be useful to also use it with the Ultra96. Since I'm using PYNQ V2.5 on both boards I expected that this would be straightforward since this is basically just an install of the NCS SDK. I followed the same steps that I did with the PYNQ-Z2 getting all the necessary files from GitHub.
When I went to install ncsdk api I encountered the following error:
Apparently the dependencies for the Arm 64 bit architecture (aarch64) used on the Ultra96 were not defined for the ncsdk. Luckily others have been down this road before me and in that Hackster project there was a link to a modified ncsdk installation on GitHub: https://github.com/markjay4k/ncsdk-aarch64. After that the installation went smoothly and I also installed the NC APP ZOO.
My next surprise occurred when I went to test the YOLO webcam example that I had tried with the PYNQ-Z2.
The PYNQ V2.5 image for the Ultra96 does not include a BaseOverlay (none of the Ultra96 versions do). This notebook was using the BaseOverlay to send video to the HDMI output (DisplayPort). I had previously used PYNQ on the Ultra96 with pynqOpenCV notebooks that do not use the HDMI output. Once I commented out the BaseOverlay, I was able to run the non HDMI cells in the notebook.
Now I need to come up with a project that uses the NCS on the Ultra96. I'll need to see if there are existing overlays that I could use or I may need to build one. The good news is that Adam Taylor is doing a workshop next Tuesday that includes building PYNQ overlays. The workshop is using the PYNQ-Z2 but the methods should apply to the Ultra96.
PYNQ-Z2 Workshop: Getting Up and Running with PYNQ
