The Raspberry Pi AI Camera with Jim Lenox

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone. Welcome back here to techron tv.

I'm happy to have my friend Jim Lenox back with us. Jim is Vice President at Sony Atrios, the Sony Semiconductor Solutions Division, and Jim's gonna tell us more about that, as well as about himself and some exciting news regarding, uh, raspberry Pi AI cameras. But let's start with Jim.

Jim, welcome back. It's good to see you. Yeah, it's good to see you, Alan.

Thanks for having us back. No, it's our pleasure. Um, so Jim, we were talking off camera.

You're a, you're a Bronx guy. You know Mike Ard, our Chief Content Officer is from the Bronx. He actually just moved back up to New York.

It's up in Harrison now. Just a little further up, a little, little bit of a more rare fire there up there than you get in the North Bronx. But, uh, anyway, it's Yankee, the Yankees are back in the World Series the first time in 15 years.

All of us from New York are very, very excited. It would've been great if it was a Subway, a true subway series with the Yankees and Max, but if you can't have the Yankees and met, you might as well have the dodger, right? Mm-Hmm.

That would've been something. Yeah. Go Yankees.

Uh, I grew up only a couple of stops away. Yeah. So good, good for them.

But Jim, beyond growing up in the Bronx and Yankee Stadium, tell us how you wound up here as Vice President and at Sony Atrios. Yeah, yeah, thank you Alan. Um, yes, I lead worldwide sales at a business unit of Sony called Rios is the offering.

And Rios is Sony's, uh, vision AI offering built around an intelligent image sensor. So my business unit is actually part of Sony Semiconductor Solutions. Sony Semiconductor Solutions is actually the world's largest provider of image sensors.

So think, you know, think about that semiconductor technology that's right behind an industrial camera lens, or the lens of a camera on a car. So many applications. And what our business unit did is it put an AI capability on an image sensing chip.

So basically to do all the image processing and the AI processing on one chip. And that is our IMX 500 intelligent image sensor. That's where I come from.

That's what I do, Alan, Per perfect. So first of all, for people who want to get more information on Rios, what's the website, Jim? The website is www dot atrios ai.

com. So that's a mouthful. Yes.

But if you, if you just search on Sony Rios, you'll get a lot of information, Get right to it. Easier, easier than typing all of that out. Good stuff.

Um, so Jim, we're, we're here to talk today, you guys, uh, I guess in conjunction with the folks from Raspberry Pie and, and correct me, I isn't Raspberry Pie like an open source consortium foundation kind of thing? Or is it a commercial company? RAs RAs PI is a commercial company, of course, headquartered in the UK worldwide distributors, you know, um, raspberry Pie has in a lot of ways democratized computing, you know, if we're gonna use, yeah, we're gonna use that word, right?

Like, uh, my kid had a ra pie in a box installed Linux. You know, it's a very common, you know, for hobbyists. But Ra pi does a lot in industrial cases.

Yeah. It's industrial. They're very proliferate with their, effectively their single board computers that are very easy to access.

Um, very easy to, uh, to build on. You know, we do a, uh, podcast called Techstrong Unplugged, and it's really aimed at, I don't want to say kids, but young adults who are coming up through high school and college will be just recent graduates and trying to keep them, you know, what's going on in tech or, you know, appealing to these audience. 'cause this is, this is the future, right?

They're the future. And, and one of the gals, Sandra Chen, Cassandra Chen is, is the, uh, one of the hosts of, of Textron Unplugged, and she actually teaches at, for the Linux Foundation, she does at all of the open source events and a cube con and stuff. She actually does a class teaching young adults from little children, eight, nine years old, all the way up, you know, programming Raspberry PIs, everybody gets to buy and they work on it.

And it's, and it's brilliant, right? Because, um, it's accessible, it's affordable hardware, um, and you build from the ground up. So, you know, as a hobbyist or a student, you can kind of, you know, build the elements of the hardware, um, have that single board computer build all the software elements, have your own little full stack going, you know, um, all four, all four, almost nothing, right?

So this is very accessible stuff and, and it's probably, you know, not intuitive for a lot of your audience, probably, you know, what is Ra Pi doing with Sony? And actually Sony and Ra PI have been working together for decades. We actually, for decades have been building a lot of their components and building a lot of their products.

You know, so we've had this longstanding relationship, and last year we made a minority investment in RA pi, right? Who had, um, and, and what we've been doing is we've had this joint development with RAs pi where we are building a, and have built and have just made available, Alan just made it available, um, a ra pi AI camera, um, built around Sony's intelligent vision, uh, sensor. So it's a real milestone actually, for both companies because RA PI now has, you know, an AI camera, you know, that can do the job that was typically expected to have a pool of GPUs on a cloud somewhere.

And a lot of accelerators and a lot of resources and complexity, you know, these RAs pi, uh, users, and there's tens of millions of RAs pi shipments, you know, have been done. There's millions of active RAs PI users, they now have available to them the ability to build vision AI solutions with RA pi. So it's a big milestone for us as a company, you know, to be part of that.

Um, and it's really great for that community that you've, you know, explained so well. Absolutely. And so I would imagine it's, it's this camera or lens on its ship that's being put right into the raspy mother.

I don't even call it motherboard into the raspy board, right? It's, and then go ahead. Oh, I'm sorry.

Yeah, it's actually, it's a RAs by AI camera that would be compatible with that single board computer. Like the PI five would be, um, would be a current version. So it's a camera that would connect, but it would connect in a way that's, you know, compatible with the RAs, PI libraries, Uhhuh Or, uh, the current RAs PI accessories for connecting.

So you use that whole back backend platform for connectivity, for storage, for, you know, e everything Precisely From our whole system. Precisely. I got it.

A big part of this is, you know, of course this is a new product, right? This AI camera for them. Um, and for us it's good.

It's, it's, uh, it's a, it's a, it's a very it innovative new offering, but it is compatible, you know, with their single board computers, with their, uh, with their libraries, right? Their video libraries, et cetera. A lot of their accessories.

And this unit, you know, this AI camera, we're talking $70 us Well happens gonna be my next thing given the economics of Raspberry Pi, what does something like this cost $70? Exactly. And that's, uh, and that's, that's big to have this level of capability, uh, a complete ability to build a vision AI solution, you know, for, uh, for effectively $70, right?

Is, is a pretty amazing, um, uh, a pretty amazing thing for the industry, But great. It really is. Let me ask you, and I don't mean to be facetious, but what's AI about this camera?

Yeah, yeah. A great, actually, great question, right? Like, you hear about AI these days, AI and more ai, and you know, the differentiation here is, you know, the Sony technology underpinning this RAs pi AI camera, you know, allows you to do, you know, vision AI on the edge.

So right behind the lens of a camera. So, you know, typically Alan to do AI on images and pictures. You're taking a boatload of videos and pictures, you're sending them somewhere, and you're just doing a lot of data science around big pools of pictures and videos.

And what we're doing is right behind the lens of a camera, right? On real estate about the size of your fingernail, right? We're doing the AI processing and sending data right off the device.

So to answer your question more succinctly is we're sending data about what people care about off the device. So if you want to count people, for example, why send pictures of people everywhere, it violates privacy. Perhaps you're sending too much data somewhere, just count the people and send that data.

We're seeing two people at this moment in time, and that's the kind of data and text data we're sending off these devices. So run an AI model right on the device and send data off the device, and we send data about what people care about. And the Raspberry Pi community is very diverse, right?

The hobbyists and the students will be building from the ground up, but there's a lot of developers using, uh, RAs pi, right? So they're now able to deploy this kind of solution much more quickly. And RAs pi, um, and it's a surprise to a lot of folks.

It's very proliferate in the manufacturing sector. It's almost hard to engage with automation experts in big manufacturers that haven't deployed raspy in some way, right? So this fits right into what they want to do as far as inspection and, and quality inspection.

I mean, I could see developers and hobbyists coming up with novel ways to use this that maybe we haven't even thought of yet. But, you know, meat and potatoes is, you know, Raz Party is an industrial workhorse. Yes.

And now being able to have this AI camera functionality attached to it, I mean, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to start thinking about ways, you know, being able to, it's like, you know, give a blind person a set of eyes and say, okay, what are they gonna do with what they see? And, and, and that's what we have with Raspy. It had other sensors, but it, what it really has is this, this platform that connects to the world, right?

That's the beautiful part about rasp is it's, it's literally a, a full blown computer on a single board, right? With all of the peripherals you'll see in someone's laptop or whatever. And now you are, but it never had a camera before.

Now you had a camera with AI capability. Well, it, it now, it, now we have, that's right. Now we have an AI camera in the portfolio.

Yep, exactly. And I love your metaphor, right? Why just have eyes, uh, why not connect to the eyes to the brain, keep the eyes in the brain as close as possible, put them on the edge and, you know, um, get insights about what you care about, right?

So I sometimes I say, yes, a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes in business, you only want two words. Is the shelf empty or not empty? Right?

Right. Just, and, and that's what we're looking, how many people are waiting in line for how long, how many people are looking at the sign or the advertisement for how long, you know, what truck is now checking in the yard and what is its container id, right? Pictures are great, but we're oftentimes looking for specific information there, and that's what AI cameras will do, right?

And that's what we'll do all down the edge very simply, quickly. And in this case for 70 bucks. Crazy.

The crazy world. Jim, you mentioned before, people wanna get information about Sonia Atrios Better Options, goog leak, Sonia Atrios for this Raspberry Pi AI camera. I would imagine you go to the Raspberry Pi website or the Sony website or any of the Sony channel for this.

Yeah, Yeah, yeah. Um, for, for rasp pi, AI camera, uh, you know, that's available through Rasp PI and their distributors. com.

And if you look in their products area, you'll find, just look for their AI camera. And that's what we're talking about. It's the easiest thing in the world to remember.

AI camera and in their products area and their accessories area. They make it very easy to get started, documentation, videos, et cetera. And also, and this is important, Alan, it's not just, you know, the hardware here in the technology, you know, there's software with this to allow you to get started.

For example, um, coming with the RAs Pi, for those that are just beginning our tools to get started building, um, there's a simple AI model that RAs Pi is providing, uh, to do object detection, which is great, you know, and there's also tools there that if someone already has an AI model, they can convert it to run on this camera. So there's all sorts of places to get started, you know, with software that enables that. I love it.

Jim, we're about outta time, man. Go Yankees. Wanna thank Yeah, go Yankees.

You know, you'll be watching, I'll be watching. Uh, should be a good series of The Dodgers are a good team as well. com and look up the AI camera, Google, Sony Rios for more information on Sony Rios, as well as Sony Semiconductor Solutions.

Jim, come back on when you got something new here for us, right? I'm sure you will. It's great seeing you, and we'll be in touch.

You too, Alan. Thanks so much. All right.

Jim Lenox, VP Sony Rios here talking about Raspberry Pi AI camera available now for just $70. Wow. This is Alan.

We're gonna take a break here on Tech Trunk tv, and we'll be back in a bit.