I received my Maixduino AI Kit. It was nicely packaged in a small plastic box. The components were neatly wrapped in bubble wrap.
The camera was pre-attached as seen in the lower right of the board so the only assembly required was to add a microSD card and attach the LCD panel cable.
I had a couple of surprises getting started. The first was that the Maixduino requires the microSD card to be formatted as FAT (not FAT32) and since the smallest one I had was 16GB I needed to reduce the active partition to 4GB before I could format it. The second was that the position of the microSD socket requires that you plug it in adjacent to the ESP32 which is somewhat awkward. You can see it in the test setup below. I started out with the generic Blink example to test the Arduino IDE setup. There is a Board file available for the Maixduino (actually looks like it supports all 4 boards types - Dock, Bit, Go, and Maixduino), so setup is fairly straightforward. There are 2 separate serial ports - one for the K210 and one for the ESP32, so you need to select the first one for programming. The only mistake that I made in initial configuration was that I forgot to change the programmer type to k-flash and that gave me a programmer error.
The Maixduino does not have an user LED like the Bit board so I needed to add one externally to run the Blink program.
Here's a short clip showing it working.
Another surprise that I had was that MaixPy was already loaded in the onboard flash memory. My webcam does not show the LCD image clearly but the text says "Welcome to MaixPy". I verified that after booting up that I could connect via a serial terminal, but it is using a very early version of MaixPy (microPython variant) and I'll replace it before I try using it.
I did a couple more quick tests using examples that were provided.
1) A short test of LCD programming - using the standard Adafruit_GFX library
2) Capture an image with the camera and display it on the LCD - a snapshot of my desktop showing notebooks and a couple of monitors.
Next I'm going to try using MaixPy and then move on to using the AI capability to do image detection. I'll also need to print a case for it. Quite pleased so far with a $25 kit. Maybe I can come up with an idea for a Vision Thing project.
