Get Started with the Raspberry Pi AI Kit

A Beginner’s Guide to AI and Edge Computing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an essential part of modern everyday life. With the rapid advancement of affordable AI-enabled hardware, it is now possible to access powerful AI accelerator devices at relatively low cost. One notable example is the Hailo AI module, which is fully compatible with the Raspberry Pi 5.

The Raspberry Pi AI Kit is a thoughtfully engineered solution that combines an M.2-based Hailo-8L accelerator with the Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+, enabling high-speed AI inference directly on the Raspberry Pi 5. With this kit, users can develop and deploy advanced real-time computer vision applications, including object detection, pose estimation, instance segmentation, smart home automation, surveillance systems, robotics, and a wide range of other neural network-driven projects.

This book serves as an introductory guide to the Raspberry Pi AI Kit. It is designed for beginners who are new to the platform and wish to explore and run basic AI-based vision models on their Raspberry Pi 5. It does not focus on the detailed process of building or compiling AI models, which typically requires a high-performance Ubuntu workstation with large storage capacity and at least 32 GB of RAM. Instead, the book focuses on practical usage, demonstrating both pre-trained and custom object detection models.

To support hands-on learning, the book includes two fully tested, real-world projects. The first project demonstrates how to detect a person and activate an LED upon detection, along with a mechanism to acknowledge the detection using an external push button. The second project shows how to detect a person and transmit the event to a smartphone via Wi-Fi, and how the detection can be acknowledged by sending a response message from the smartphone back to the Raspberry Pi 5.