Canadian pc imaginative and prescient specialist Maxlab has introduced a successor to 2023’s Tokay Lite digital camera improvement board, swapping out the unique’s Espressif ESP32-S3 for a extra highly effective NXP Semiconductors i.MX 8M Plus chip on a Variscite DART-MX8M-PLUS system-on-module (SOM).
“During the last 12 months, we now have been engaged on citing the Tokay Professional superior digital camera,” the corporate says of the brand new board. “This digital camera [developer board] permits connecting as much as three totally different sensors (video, thermal, and spectral, for instance) for essentially the most bold initiatives. The digital camera can detect and observe a number of objects in a single body whereas working high-performance pc imaginative and prescient fashions. Whereas Tokay Lite is optimized for ultra-low energy utilization, the subsequent iteration of our devkits focuses on excessive efficiency.”
Maxlab has introduced the Tokay Professional improvement board (high), constructed round NXP’s i.MX 8M Plus system-on-chip. (📷: NXP)
The brand new Tokay Professional, dropped at our consideration by Linux Gizmos, is designed as a extra highly effective successor Maxlab’s Tokay Lite, unveiled on Crowd Provide again in 2023. Again then, the corporate was utilizing an Espressif ESP32-S3 microcontroller with two 32-bit Tensilica Xtensa LX7 cores working at as much as 240MHz, 512kB of static RAM, and 8MB of pseudo-static RAM. The brand new Tokay Professional, against this, comes with significantly beefier specs, because of a Variscite DART-MX8M-PLUS system-on-module (SOM) on its higher aspect.
The Variscite SOM is constructed across the NXP i.MX 8M Plus, which has 4 64-bit Arm Cortex-A53 processor cores working at 800MHz, down from the half’s 1.8GHz most, a Cortex-M7 coprocessor working at as much as 800MHz, and a neural coprocessor delivering a claimed 2.3 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of minimum-precision compute for on-board machine studying and synthetic intelligence (ML and AI) workloads. That is on high of 2GB of RAM and 4GB of eMMC storage, Vivanti GC520L 2D and GC7000UL 3D graphics accelerators, a Tensilica HiFi 4 digital sign processor (DSP), 1080p60 H.264/H.265 encoding and H.264/H.264/VP8/VP9 decoding in {hardware}, and a picture sign processor able to dealing with as much as 375 megapixels of digital camera knowledge. The service board, in the meantime, consists of microphone and passive infrared (PIR) movement sensor.
The board is a follow-up to 2023’s Tokay Lite, which used a 32-bit Espressif ESP32-S3 microcontroller. (📷: Maxlab)
“Our digital camera helps a number of sensors,” Maxlab explains of how that performance is introduced out on the Tokay Professional itself, “and we are able to connect as much as three totally different sensors concurrently on the machine. What it means is our digital camera can help thermal, spectral, 3D, or seen spectrum sensors on the identical time. The default choice is [a Sony] IMX219 [eight-megapixel sensor], however it may be simply changed with another module, so long as it helps a Raspberry Pi digital camera connector.”
Extra data is accessible on the Maxlab web site, the place it’s presently accepting orders — although the value had not been disclosed publicly on the time of writing.
