Comment by ein0p
2 days ago
This is way too outdated to be relevant in any way. Back in the day they had a board with a TPU on it, before everyone else did. That board ran object detection at a pretty good resolution at like 80fps in 2.5W power budget. I still have that board in my drawer - I never did find any use for it at its price point. Plus, because it's Google, I expected that they'd abandon the board within 2 years tops, which is exactly what happened. The board was like $100 IIRC which was a good chunk of cash when RaspberryPi was like $25. Nowadays there are _dozens_ of Chinese boards available with on-chip TPUs. Tooling still sucks mightily, but that's expected when dealing with embedded systems. Unlike with the Google board, you can usually build your own Linux for these using Yocto or Buildroot with minimal tweaks.
Is there a more cost effective solution for frigate nvr?
Rockchip are the most common "Chinese boards available with on-chip TPUs" as the GP comment puts it, and they are community supported by Frigate now: https://docs.frigate.video/frigate/hardware/#rockchip-platfo...
RK3566 boards are cheaper than a Raspberry Pi 5, but you get less model support, and no Frigate+ model.
A mini-PC like a Lenovo m720q or m920q can be had for about $120 on secondary markets. It works great for me as a frigate server. I'm using it with 6 cameras and plan to add couple of more. If you look around on ebay, you might able to find one with 16gb ram and even a m.2 or SSD drive included. Then get the m.2 (A+E) version of the Coral TPU board ($30-35). That can be inserted into the wifi board slot. The m720q has a i5-8400T. While it's a 8th gen intel CPU , its more than capable of handling Frigate , as well several other applications if you run it in Proxmox or even barebones install. It has one m.2 for storage slot. But can also hold one 2.5 inch SSD. So you can drop in a cheap nvme drive for boot & OS. Use a much cheaper larger SSD for video storage. (what i've done)