Today I published a video detailing my testing of three new Raspberry Pi HATs—these HATs all add on PoE+ power and an NVMe SSD slot, though the three go about it in different ways.
You can watch the video for the full story (embedded below), but in this post I'll go through my brief thoughts on all three, and link to a few other options coming on the market as well.
Raspberry Pi today launched the AI Kit, a $70 addon which straps a Hailo-8L on top of a Raspberry Pi 5, using the recently-launched M.2 HAT (the Hailo-8L is of the M.2 M-key variety, and comes preinstalled).
The Hailo-8L's claim to fame is 3-4 TOPS/W efficiency, which, along with the Pi's 3-4W idle power consumption, puts it alongside Nvidia's edge devices like the Jetson Orin in terms of TOPS/$ and TOPS/W for price and efficiency.
Google's Coral TPU has been a popular choice for a machine learning/AI accelerator for the Pi for years now, but Google seems to have left the project on life support, after the Coral hardware was scalped for a couple years about as badly as the Raspberry Pi itself!