Orange Pi AI Stick Lite $20 Neural Compute Stick Ships with Free Training Tools

Shenzhen Xunlong Software launched Orange Pi AI Stick 2801 neural compute stick last year for $69. It was interesting as an alternative to Intel Neural Compute Stick. But once the documentation and SDK were released a few days later we discovered you could only run demos with the stick for that price, and the training tools would cost an extra $149.

The excellent news is that the company has now launched an updated, yet similar Orange Pi AI Stick Lite for just $19.99, and best of all the PLAI training tools are now entirely free.

Orange Pi AI Stick Lite specifications:

• ASIC – Gyrfalcon SPR2801S Lightspeeur series processor with 2-dimensional Matrix Processing Engine (MPE) with AI Processing in Memory (APiM) delivering up to 2.8TOPS @ 300mW, 5.6 TOPS @ 100 MHz (peak performance)
• Storage – eMMC 4.5 flash with 68 MB/s read, 84.69 MB/s write
• Host interface – USB 3.0/2.0 port
• Power Consumption – 5V @ 200mA
• Dimensions – 66.5 x 20.5 x 10.8 mm
• Temperature Range – Operating: 0 to 40°C; storage: -20 to 80°C

The hardware specifications look the same as last year’s model. Supported frameworks include Tensorflow, Caffe and PyTorch, and VGG & SSD models can run on the stick.

The company mentions compatibility with Allwinner based Orange Pi SBC’s, but the SDK is offered for Arm and x86 together with 1-2 model demos. The Plai training tools (aka model transformation tools) which allow customizing the models running on the stick are now provided for free, but for some unknown reason, the company does not provide a public download link and instead tells people to contact them to get it.

All related public documentation available on Orange Pi website was released in November 2018. via www.cnx-software.com

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