Re:Ask HN: Any Hardware Startups Here?
by moffkalast on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @03:26PM
(#36605796)
Ngl I really wish Luxonis cameras supported running standalone after being configured once, OpenVino is such a heckin chonker to install and manage.
Re:Ask HN: Any Hardware Startups Here?
by MrBuddyCasino on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @04:27PM
(#36606634)
The ESP32-P4 has hardware accelerators for media-encoding, including H.264. Might want to check it out.
Is it out yet?
I'm desperately waiting for it to be available.
Re:Ask HN: Any Hardware Startups Here?
by MrBuddyCasino on Thursday July 06, 2023 @05:48AM
(#36613552)
Since they announced it half a year ago I would have expected engineering samples to be available by now, but there is nothing.
Luxonis is way more powerful and has an Intel VPU (Movidius). It's not really meant to be a standalone platform, so it needs a host board (Linux SBC like the Pi). It takes a lot more power, but it can do 60fps on small Yolo models. Its resolution is a lot higher as well.
ESP32-S3 has a pretty small memory capacity, and doesn't have H264-H265 hardware encoding, so you'll be on low-res, low-fps. It only does MJPEG (AFAIK) streaming, so you'll also have to deal with high latency if you want to send that data somewhere. The big bonus is that it's low-cost and low-power, and you're running it directly on the core without an OS.
This means you can do stuff like sleep the cores until something wakes it up (like a PIR sensor that detects people), and it will start streaming in a second or two.
TL;DR: Luxonis stronk, but needs big batteries or plugged in. ESP32-S3 can run on small batteries or solar.