One weird trick to shrink convolutional networks for TinyML

A colleague recently asked for more details on an approach I recommended, but which she hadn’t seen any documentation for. I realized that it was something I’d learned from talking to model builders at Google, and I wasn’t sure there was anything written up, so in the spirit of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for anyone coming after, I thought I should...

Aug 2021

How to write to flash on an Arduino Nano BLE

Photo by Brecht Bug I’ve been enjoying using the Arduino Nano Sense BLE 33 board as an all-round microcontroller for my machine learning work, but I had trouble figuring out how to programmatically write to flash memory from a sketch. I need to do this because I want to be able to download ML models over Bluetooth and then have them persist even...

Apr 2021

How to transfer files over BLE

Image from Wikipedia I’ve now taught a lot of workshops on TinyML using the Arduino Nano Sense BLE 33 board, including the new EdX course, and while it’s a fantastic piece of technology I often have to spend a lot of time helping students figure out how to get the boards communicating with their computer. Flashing programs to the Arduino relies...

Apr 2021

How screen scraping and TinyML can turn any dial into an API

https://github.com/jomjol/AI-on-the-edge-device This image shows a traditional water meter that’s been converted into a web API, using a cheap ESP32 camera and machine learning to understand the dials and numbers. I expect there are going to be billions of devices like this deployed over the next decade, not only for water meters but for any...

Mar 2021

Why Do I Think There Will be Hundreds of Billions of TinyML Devices Within a Few Years?

Image by The Noun Project A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to have the chance to present at the Linley Processor Conference. I gave a talk on “What TinyML Needs from Hardware“, and afterwards one of the attendees emailed to ask where some of my numbers came from. In particular, he was intrigued by my note on slide 6 that “Expectations are for...

Nov 2020

How to Organize a Zoom Wedding

Photo by Chantal Joanne and I got engaged two years ago in Paris, and were planning on getting married in the summer, before the pandemic intervened. Once it became clear that it might be years until everybody could meet up in person, especially older members of our families who were overseas, we started looking into how we could have our ceremony...

Aug 2020

The Five: Putting Jack the Ripper’s Victims at the Center of the Story

Years ago I went on a “Jack the Ripper” walking tour when I visited London without giving it much thought. The murders felt like fiction, in the same realm as Sherlock Holmes or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Even visiting the spots where the bodies were found didn’t make an impact. I’ve never been a “Ripperologist” but as someone interested in Victorian history...

May 2020

Quantization Screencast

TinyML Book Screencast #4 – Quantization For the past few months I’ve been working with Zain Asgar and Keyi Zhang on EE292D, Machine Learning on Embedded Systems, at Stanford. We’re hoping to open source all the materials after the course is done, but I’ve been including some of the lectures I’m leading as part of my TinyML YouTube series. Since I’ve talked a lot about...

May 2020

Converting a TensorFlow Lite .cc data array into a file on disk

Most of the devices TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers runs on don’t have file systems, so the model data is typically included by compiling a source file containing an array of bytes into the executable. I recently added a utility to help convert files into nicely-formatted source files and headers, as the convert_bytes_to_c_source() function, but...

Feb 2020

TinyML Book Released!

I’ve been excited about running machine learning on microcontrollers ever since I joined Google and discovered the amazing work that the speech wakeword team were doing with 13 kilobyte models, and so I’m very pleased to finally be able to share a new O’Reilly book that shows you how to build your own TinyML applications. It took me and my colleague...

Jan 2020