A couple years ago I did a TADHack where I envisioned a cheap, low-powered camera that could run complex computer vision and stream remotely when needed. After considering what it would take to build something like this myself, I waited patiently for this tech to come. Today with Google’s new AIY Vision kit, we are pretty much there.
The AIY Vision Kit is a $45 add-on board that attaches to a Raspberry Pi Zero with a Pi 2 camera. The board includes a Vision Processing Unit (VPU) chip that runs Tensor Flow image processing graphs super efficiently. The kit comes with a bunch of examples out of the box, but to actually see what the camera see’s you need to plug the HDMI into a monitor. That’s not very useful when you want to put your battery powered kit in a remote location. And while it is nice that the rig does not require any Internet connectivity, that misses out on a lot of the fun applications. So, let’s add some WebRTC to the AIY Vision Kit to let it stream over the web.