Yeah, I didn't understand the purpose of this device when it came out and still don't. It's an interesting system but seems like worst of both worlds because the coral TPU and M7 aren’t low power enough for battery applications, and it's unclear whether the full 4 TOPS of the Coral is achievable given the MCU’s memory bus bandwidth. So to me it looks like a computationally underpowered system that you have to keep plugged into the wall.
Going with the Cortex A Coral Dev Board or another SBC with the PCIe or USB standalone Coral TPU seems like a better bet. You'd get a better camera (eg via USB), more processing power and memory, and more full featured software (both Linux and TFLite instead of baremetal or embedded OS and TFLite Micro). Price point would be higher for this option, but you'd certainly make that up in saved time very quickly not having to deal with baremetal programming or an embedded OS.
One thing that springs to mind is a monitor for predator (pest animal) traps in remote bush regions. The system spends most of its time asleep, and is woken and starts consuming power only when a PIR sensor is triggered from a visiting animal's body heat.
Then the battery-sapping stuff happens to analyse video and differentiate between target and non-target species and finally trigger the trap or go back to sleep.
A system like this would be an ecological game changer in my country.
Jetson Nano is a lot more expensive. But at the same price point as Coral you can buy Orange Pi 5 with 4 gigs of ram, 6 tops NPU(not supported as good as Coral though, but is generally more open and has support of much more frameworks) and have a full-blown OS there. SBC is $66, and camera is another $15. And you can buy it right now, not "pre-order" something "coming soon". Coral supply history is a very sad tale. The hardware was impressive 4 years ago, when it first came out. But now we have no second generation in sight, no supply and no communication from Google that they are still interested in this project.
I've been writing gstreamer-based inference pipelines for a couple years on Jetsons and in my experience there is never a "just" with any of the these, sadly. It is such a painful platform to deal with at a software level... I wish NVidia had more competition.
Without RidgeRun wiki's working pipelines I'd have suspected gstreamer on Jetson never worked at all. It's beautiful when everything comes together but absolutely chock-full of gotchas.
Plus Nvidia seems to think that an acceptable time frame to support a Jetson model is like 2 years, which makes them effectively abandonware soon after launch. They get one LTS OS distro and that's it.
Compare that to ~15 years of ongoing support that the Pi foundation does for the average Pi.
I concur. I've been in that ecosystem for a few years and I finally had to give up on my Jetson Nano in "favor" the new Jetson Nano Orin. Which did solve a lot of my issues with software, and I paid for it, too. Just say no to Nvidia sbc lol but it's extremely powerful when the software is aligned with your goals.
Going with the Cortex A Coral Dev Board or another SBC with the PCIe or USB standalone Coral TPU seems like a better bet. You'd get a better camera (eg via USB), more processing power and memory, and more full featured software (both Linux and TFLite instead of baremetal or embedded OS and TFLite Micro). Price point would be higher for this option, but you'd certainly make that up in saved time very quickly not having to deal with baremetal programming or an embedded OS.