Coral TPU

[Will Stillwell]

Moving this to it's own thread so it is not buried in a docker thread that people may not know is now about the TPU. 

  I would like to report that today was a good test.  Lately when the garbage truck would pull up to my can, the Camect would not record right after the motion until he was past my can.   Today I watched from before he pulled in front of my home to pass my home.  The event generation didn't impact the recording of the video or display of the video either.  In the past if I went to the real time display after the event triggered, it would not resolve and show live video until after the event was over.  In this aspect the Coral TPU is a HUGE success for my system, and well worth the $.   

Everybody else your mileage may vary. 

~Will

[CamectArup]

Thanks Will ... This is great feedback. If anyone else is noticing the Coral TPU making a significant difference in how well the system works in specific situations, we'd love to hear about it. 

[Will Stillwell]

Oh, 1 other thing I just noticed while looking at the same driveway camera.  After every activity dark green, I don't believe I see any black right after it.  Same thing with no black during a light green.   Prior to the Coral that was very common on that camera.   

~Will

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[Cameron Vandiver]

Hey CamectArup, can you explain the use of the Coral TPU?  Is this now officially supported and if so do you have usage instructions?  

I know the device is a USB module and I see that others state to plug it in a cycle power but I do not see official instructions from you.

Thanks!

[Will Stillwell]

There is actually very little information.   From Arup:  Click the buy button here to see the various choices for buying. One again -- spend the money only if you don't mind spending it to see what you get. We are making very little in the way of specific claims right now, as we have very limited experience with it.  

You plug it in to a BLUE USB 3 port on the Camect.   You need a full power off power on cycle or 2 sometimes for it to show up.   

If the board is being detected properly, it will be used for all of the object detection. To make sure it's working, visit local.home.camect.com when on the same local network as your device and sign in with your local admin account. Add  /debug/prof to the end of the url, and search for "obj" in the filter box at the top.   

If everything looks right, it is working behind the scenes and there is nothing else you need to do.   

I do not know the level of support Camect will provide but to me and others it has been worth it. 

~Will

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[CamectArup]

The only official instructions so far were in the release notes for the current release here ... but they are slightly wrong, as I did not realize at the time that a full power cycle is required for the board to be properly detected. That became clearer as others tried it. Will did a pretty good job at quoting the other little bits of information that have been posted. 

Coral will only help you if you are running into the limits of the hardware. That can happen if you are close to or above our suggested max of 24MP total camera resolution, or have many cameras that can simultaneously see movement (e.g. you have several cameras pointed at the same scene). Coral offloads the AI processing from the main CPU/GPU and is faster at doing the AI processing, so it increases the ability of your device to detect things.  We knew (as you can see from older forum threads) that Will was occasionally running into limits on his device even though he's a little below 24MP, and, as we had hoped, it seems to have helped there. 

Once again -- we have very limited information about how much it helps, and what we know is mostly what you also see in the forums. We're not making specific claims about how much it will help right now ... We threw it out there to see what people's experiences are -- think of it as experimental. Since it does seem to help those with busy systems, we're not likely to intentionally break support for it, but it's also possible that someday their software stack could change in a way that we can't use it, etc. Buy it only if you don't mind taking the risk on spending $60 to see if you can benefit from its capabilities. 

[Srinivas T]

Arup, I took a plung into what you mentioned "Buy it only if you don't mind taking the risk on spending $60 to see if you can benefit from its capabilities." Amazon was fast with my order, it was 1 day arrived. Immediately, installed it. Like suggested, did a "full power cycle". Here are my observations... Earlier only 8 were showing up and now 9th camera is showing up out of 11 around the house. However, interestingly seeing 3rd and 4th (now new thing) circling 'connecting' followed by 'ready to play' more often (not always). By the way the 11 camera models are: 5 nest supported (1 outdoor, 3 regular, 1 dropcam the very first version - all non-IQ) + 6 ubiquiti UVC micros, first version. All automatically added to Camect. Last 2 (earlier it used to be 3 cameras) added are the ones that always say "Connection dropped" sometimes "Unable to connect" - which makes me believe the limit is 8th camera and after the Corel install now 9. I want to monitor a couple of days to see if the 9th camera will continue to stick or would revert to 'Connection dropped'. Other than this, here is the graph from 'obj-detector-edgetpu...'. it is night time so no observations made with movement alerts and any lag (better compared to pre-Corel days or not) etc. 

More when I get to observe more in the next few days... overall, it appears the coral seems promising nice addition. For sure, if it can consistently push the limit to 9th camera. Let me see...

Graph obj-detector-edgetpu...

[ZzyzxOh]

Is there any indication anywhere that the Coral device is active in the Camect box once you have it up and running?

[Will Stillwell]

From earlier in the thread.   From what I understand that is the only way.  Maybe They could add something in the Home Info screen that it is using it.  They list CPU and RAM maybe they could add a section for the Coral TPU 

If the board is being detected properly, it will be used for all of the object detection. To make sure it's working, visit local.home.camect.com when on the same local network as your device and sign in with your local admin account. Add  /debug/prof to the end of the url, and search for "obj" in the filter box at the top.   

If everything looks right, it is working behind the scenes and there is nothing else you need to do.   

~Will

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/camect.com/d/msgid/forum/deaf97f7-ab89-4526-890c-1a1f19973392n%40camect.com.

[ZzyzxOh]

Great example, thank you. I was able to confirm from your image things are fine, although my "hits" are a lot lower than in the image. Thank you.

(Sorry, the forum won't let me snip out any of the excess repeated text.)

[ZzyzxOh]

I am investigating that there have been zero alerts in Telegram since the power-cycle to add the Coral USB Accelerator.

[CamectArup]

Does it look like an alert delivery issue? (i.e. Do you still see alerts detected in the UI and/or in email but simply not delivered by telegram, or are no alerts getting detected at all?) 

[ZzyzxOh]

I receive alerts for Camera Offline, but no alerts for anything sensed now. I actually watched live a delivery truck go by and it should have been sensed on two cameras, both active and online, but nothing. I'm sure there were other alerts from the snowplows. So, the Telegram connection is there for Online/Offline, but I don't see other events being triggered.

The "obj" numbers for TPU are non-zero, although I don't know how to interpret them.

[ZzyzxOh]

I just Enable "person" Alert on an interior camera and that worked perfectly. I am going to test to see if updating alerts in other cameras will get them going again.

[CamectArup]

That sounds pretty odd to me. How was that camera configured before you enabled person alerts? Was the same technique successful on other cameras?   If there's still unaccounted-for stuff happening, you may want to use "Report Bug" to let us take a look at your configuration and mention what's not getting detected. If you can point at an example time on a particular camera where something should have been detected that may also help. 

[J.C. Wren]

I've seen the same thing. Bought the Coral TP, installed it (no problems), shows up in the stats as detecting objects, but I get no alerts via email or Telegram.

--jc

Save a life; adopt a shelter animal.

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[CamectArup]

And what happens if you remove the Coral and reboot again?  Do things go back to working? 

In order to help us understand what is going wrong, it would help if you can use "Report Bug" shortly after something should have been detected ... Mention which camera, what should have been detected, and the time (including time zone) with your Coral enabled. Try to pick an object that clearly would have been detected w/o Coral. 

[ZzyzxOh]

First, it seems my monitoring options are different than they were or are being respected where they were ignored before. I see a quiet window from 0:00-8:00 that might have been in effect when I was editing the Alarm Rules overnight. That was probably always there but not impacting all cameras before.

Second, one exterior camera saw a snowplow just after sunrise and alerted on it, but a second camera did not alter when the plow went across its view. I am looking into those two Nest configurations, as they may be different models (IQ vs not IQ) or have different configurations.

Third, this camect has also attached External Storage, a 4TB USB drive. I don't know if it is related but when I clicked the "back" arrow to review past events I was seeing videos recorded in February or March. I don't recall the webpage going back like that before, but it could be that I have tried that in a long time and the many improvements made in the software over the last several months made that possible.

Fourth, on the camera that did see the snowplow at sunrise, I had been playing with settings to get it sensing again and I saw a button for highlighting the motion and enabled it. I am trying to get back to that setting because I don't think it is global to all cameras but is triggered on all of them. My understanding of where I set that or whether it is global could be due to the late hour I was working on this. I was trying to get the sensed alarms working before heading to bed.

It's premature to send a Debug (Report Bug). I'll go through my settings from scratch since a lot of time has passed since this was set up. I will also put a Coral TPU on my second Camect and see how that behaves.

Thanks for your excellent efforts to enhance the product. The ten cameras on the first camect seem more stable today, but that might just be Nest's platform working out their issues. 

[Will Stillwell]

Not saying it is... but it is possible some little changes could have popped up at the same time because of the software update a couple days ago?  New bug?  Who knows.  But yeah double check all your configs.   

~Will

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[ZzyzxOh]

As part of the troubleshooting I did a software restart (via webpage). Things are back to normal now, but I can't tell if it was the restart or various attempts to change what was being sensed. I will add a TPU to a second Camect shortly, but connect it with the POWER OFF to see if it comes up smoothly and not change any settings to get it functioning as it does now.

[Will Stillwell]

Standard #1 Tech support question    "Did you restart your computer?"  

=

"Did you restart your Camect?  It is a computer after all."

~Will

[Tony Welle]

Added Coral, restarted and/or power cycled several times. Although it appears to be working, the CPU based obj detection is also appearing. Any suggestions?

[Will Stillwell]

I have but one suggestion.  Ok question first. When you say power cycled  How were you power cycling?  OK  fact is it sees it so I don't think that is the problem.  I have a vague memory of this happening, and I did a service restart and after that it was normal?  Not a power reboot, but just a service restart.  Maybe I pulled the power plug for 30 seconds, but I am pretty sure that is what I did to get it to see it at all.   So yeah try just a service restart.  If that doesn't work maybe Arup has better idea. 

And he might want you to submit your debug logs.   Might be a good idea before you restart services to do that.  

~Will

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[CamectArup]

I'll reach out to you in email to get some more info about this. 

[Rob Taft]

I have the same showing for me.

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[JimBoCA]

I need another one and Amazon is now sold out and they don't know when it will be back in stock :( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07S214S5Y

I found it other places but more expensive.

[Grover D]

I ordered and installed my coral TPU a few days ago. It took 2 boots of the camect to 'see' it. I could only tell if it was working via the debug panel. I have not had any issues getting my alert emails. I did have to update my email SMTP server due to some changes from my provider (AT&T/Yahoo). I am seeing better processing time for the alerts. I have (8) 4MP+ cameras on my system and where I used to get messages that the system was too busy, I no longer see those messages.

[Richard M]

Can you tell me where you bought your Coral TPU from ?  I am in Canada and can't find it anywhere.  Even Amazon with their outlandish pricing is now unavailable.  Looking for someone in Canada or someone in the US who is willing to ship to Canada.

Thanx..

Richard

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[Will Stillwell]

I looked at several of the resellers listed on the official site and nobody seems to have them right now.  Wonder how many were sold for us Camect users.   That makes me wonder.  

Arup do you guys get information from our camects without us sending it?  Like performance metrics or anything? Can you tell how many units actually have Coral TPU now?  

~Will

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[Grover D]

I got my from Amazon. I looked just now. They are out of stock and only 'other sellers' have them. About 160 as I recall.

I will say that I got mine by checking back each day/evening. Took me about a week.

[CamectArup]

Coincidentally, I was looking to buy another one yesterday, with the same issue. I'm guessing/hoping these are just stock hiccups due to people being on vacation this week. 

No, we currently have no easy way to tell how many people are using Coral. We get some very basic information from a device when it connects, like what software version it is running,  and number of cameras defined. No performance metrics.  In general, we try not to collect info we don't need. 

[Mike Perry]

https://www.seeedstudio.com/Coral-USB-Accelerator.html

Seems to have them. I've orders from Seeed on a number of occasions with out issue. Although it looks like it will be coming from their CN warehouse, so it might take some time to get to you.

[Eric]

I got mine from Mouser.

[Michael H]

Mouser just now states availability “expected 3/8/2021”

Sent from my iPhone

On Dec 29, 2020, at 2:13 PM, Eric <aut0mat...@gmail.com> wrote:

I got mine from Mouser.

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[Richard M]

Thanks...They are on the Mouser Canadian page but I was informed that they won't be selling them in Canada, so, that went nowhere. If anyone knows who might have stock, please let us know.

Richard

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[zeg...@gmail.com]

Did you try eBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Google-G950-01456-01-Coral-USB-Accelerator/154266083253?epid=8037421289&hash=item23eaf99fb5:g:coAAAOSw8JRf6eD7

 

I am sure someone is selling theirs..

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[Richard M]

Thanks for the info as it looks like that is the ONLY way that I will be able to get one up here in Canada.  Yesterday, I had sent an email off directly to the folks at Coral AI and they responded at  the end of the day.  It turns out that the Coral USB Accelerator is the only product that is NOT yet certified in Canada ude to th language issue which is why I can't find it anywhere.  I guess that I will have to buy a used one off ebay, however, some of the pricing is crazy overpriced.

Thanks again for your feedback.  I am still looking for a unit if anyone has one for sale.

Richard

[JimBoCA]

Well, I ordered from Seeed on the 29th, went back and checked yesterday and it still says order is in Confirmed state so I emailed them and now they say it is not in stock and won't be until 2/26.

[lor...@redlefsen.com]

Re-upping an old thread.

I just received my Coral (ordered in February, from Mouser, and it just showed up). Mouser is currently out of stock, but showing about 3k units expected to arrive next week (June 1, and June 3, 2021).

I had to power-cycle my box twice (I pushed the black "power" button, watched the blue light turn itself off after about 5-10 seconds, then pulled the plug for 5-10 seconds, and re-inserted the plug).

My Coral has only been installed maybe 10-15 minutes, but subjectively, the machine feels "snappier": when I go to the "preview" page (i.e., the page that shows the video feeds from all cameras -- home.camect.com), the video playing back is much smoother, even though the scene is pretty busy. There are a lot of trees, and it's a slightly windy day, so all the leaves are swaying back and forth. This used to show up as slightly choppy video playback, and often, the dreaded "Camect is busy" message, but right now, the playback seems very smooth.

Just so I understand: if object detection/recognition is offloaded to a Coral, does this offload significant CPU cycles that the system can use for other stuff like transcoding video streams? That's what it feels like to me.

[Will Stillwell]

I could see that being some.  But also I can see some of it could possibly be from clearing out all the memory (ram) and starting clean. 

~Will

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[lor...@redlefsen.com]

Oh, so you mean that simply rebooting the machine could have made it snappier, because it "clear's out all the RAM"?

Wouldn't that imply a memory leak? I would expect the machine to reach steady state memory utilization at startup, and then pretty quickly level off, freeing memory it no longer needs as it goes.