Google recently released an updated version of Mendel Linux for its flagship Coral development board, as well as the Coral system-on-module (SoM) plugin.
The company only started releasing the official version of the hardware last month, and at the time it promised that a new version of Mendel based on Debian 10 Buster would be available soon. This is the same version of Debian that the Raspberry Pi Foundation used to build the latest version of Raspbian OS. Coral developers are now able to test version 4.0 of Google's customized Debian operating system.
The new Mendel Linux 4.0 Day, comes with upgraded GStreamer pipelines and support for Python 3.7, OpenCV and OpenCL. It also updates the Linux to version 4.14 and U-boot to version 2017.03.3.
The primary goal of Coral products is to offload AI workloads to input-output devices, so that pre-trained AI models can process data closer to the data collection sensors, outside the data center and offline.
The Coral Dev Board includes the Coral SoM, which features a GPU, video processing unit (VPU), a Google Edge TPU ASIC with the NXP IMX8M SoC, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, memory, and storage.
According to Carlos Mendonça, product manager of Coral Team, it is now possible to use the Dev Board's GPU to convert YUV data to RGB pixels at up to 130 frames per second in 1080p resolution, which is twice as fast as the devices that run its predecessor Day, the Chef.
Google also announced MediaPipe for Coral, a framework for bringing perception capabilities to Coral boards. It's called MediaPipe because it allows developers to create "learning pipelines" for processing media, such as video and audio, on the device.
Some of the capabilities that Google has added to MediaPipe include hand detection and gesture recognition, multi-hand detection, face detection, hair classification, and object detection.
Additionally, Google released a new tutorial for the Teachable Sorter, a physical sorting machine that uses the capabilities of the Coral USB Accelerator to quickly sort different objects as they pass in front of the camera lens. The Coral Accelerator is a two-finger-sized component with an Edge TPU processor, which connects to Debian Linux machines via a USB 3.0 Type-C cable.
