In the benchmarking results, we have seen that MaaXBoard Mini is a powerful board, with results comparable to Jetson Nano when benchmarked on the Mobilenet model:
Despite it's name, the MaaXBoard Mini is mighty indeed! It boasts Quad Cortex-A53 at 1.8GHz and Cortex-M4F at 400MHz, a speedup compared to regular MaaXBoard's Quad Cortex-A53 at 1.5GHz and Cortex-M4F at 266MHz.
At only $72.50, it's one of the most cost effective boards capable of running Machine Learning.
How to get set up using Machine Learning on MaaXBoard Mini?
There are a number of tutorials on Hackster for setting up Tensorflow, Tensorflow Lite, OpenCV on MaaXBoard and doing tasks like facial recognition and image recognition on MaaXBoard.
Can all of these tutorials be run on MaaXBoard Mini? Yes!
Nearly everything that can be done on MaaXBoard can be done on MaaXBoard Mini. However, because because of the slightly different build of Debian, there are a few minor differences I ran into.
The following tutorials use the MaaXBoard Mini Debian image. Yocto, Android and Windows IoT Core are also available for MaaXBoard and MaaXBoard Mini, and I will be creating tutorials for setting up Machine Learning on both of these in the coming weeks.
You'll need the MIPI-DSI display in order to complete this tutorial, as MaaXBoard Mini doesn't have onboard HDMI like the MaaXBoard does.
There are a couple of fixes for MaaXBoard Mini's debian image. Update and fix apt (advanced package tool), just like you do on regular MaaXBoard. For the ix this using the command:
mv /usr/lib/libOpenVG.so /usr/lib/libOpenVG.so.OLD
Additionally, if you want to do some things within Debian's /etc folder, like setting the date and time using timedatectl, you'll have to set root permissions for the folder:
chown root /etc
Set up OpenCV on the MaaXboard
This tutorial is identical for MaaXBoard Mini.
Build Tensorflow for MaaXBoard
This tutorial is identical for MaaXBoard Mini.
Installing and Using Tensorflow Lite on MaaXBoard
This tutorial is identical for MaaXBoard Mini.
Benchmarking Machine Learning on MaaXBoard
This tutorial is identical for MaaXBoard Mini. My own benchmarking results for MaaXBoard and MaaXBoard Mini are here.
Ransom Note Letter Finder with OpenCV and Tesseract on MaaXBoard
This tutorial uses the Avnet MIPI display. Because the Debian image for MaaXBoard Mini is already configured to use the MIPI display, you won't need to configure it, so that's one less step. Otherwise, it's identical.
5 Minute Smart Doorbell on MaaXBoard
This tutorial is identical for MaaXBoard Mini. One of the benefits of a faster processor is that installing dlib on MaaXBoard Mini is noticeably faster than on MaaXBoard. It still takes longer than 5 minutes.
Run the Dobble Challenge on MaaXBoard Mini
This tutorial is identical for MaaXBoard Mini.
How exactly is MaaXBoard Mini different than MaaXBoard?
As mentioned before, MaaXBoard Mini is nearly identical to MaaXBoard, except that it's a bit faster, a tad more power hungry, and it has 2 additional USB ports instead of an HDMI display port. Additionally, the latest addition to the MaaXBoard family, MaaXBoard Nano was just released last week, and MaaXBoard RT, which was launched for pre-order this week!
Here's a chart comparing all four boards side by side:
Good luck with using MaaXBoard Mini for your Machine Learning and AI adventures! Please let me know if you have any questions or comments - I love to hear from you.
