The idea behind the Adafruit BrainCraft HAT is that you’d be able to “craft brains” for Machine Learning on the EDGE, with Microcontrollers & Microcomputers. On ASK AN ENGINEER, our founder & engineer chatted with Pete Warden, the technical lead of the mobile, embedded TensorFlow Group on Google’s Brain team about what would be ideal for a board like this.

And here’s what we designed! The BrainCraft HAT has a 240×240 TFT IPS display for inference output, slots for a camera connector cable for imaging projects, a 5 way joystick and button for UI input, left and right microphones, stereo headphone out, a stereo 1 Watt speaker out, three RGB DotStar LEDs, two 3 pin STEMMA connectors on PWM pins so they can drive NeoPixels or servos, and Grove/STEMMA/Qwiic I2C port. This will let people build a wide range of audio/video AI projects while also allowing easy plug-in of sensors and robotics!

A controllable mini fan attaches to the bottom, and can be used to keep your Pi cool while doing intense AI inference calculations. Most importantly, there’s an On/Off switch that will completely disable the audio codec, so that when it's off, there’s no way it's listening to you.

Features:

The STEMMA QT port means you can attach heat image sensors like the Panasonic Grid-EYE or MLX90640. Heat-Sensitive cameras can be used as a person detector, even in the dark! An external accelerometer can be attached for gesture or vibration sensing such as machinery/industrial predictive maintenance projects

This guide was first published on Oct 06, 2020. It was last updated on Mar 13, 2024.

This page (Overview) was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

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