← Lab Lab
Edge-AI and RF bench
A Raspberry Pi 5 with a Hailo-8 accelerator, software-defined radio, and a pile of sensors — a bench for learning edge inference and RF.
A corner of the lab is given over to small hardware: somewhere to learn edge inference, software-defined radio, and sensor plumbing without a rack in sight.
The core
A Raspberry Pi 5 paired with a Hailo-8 AI accelerator (26 TOPS) on NVMe — enough to run real inference at the edge instead of shipping every frame back to a server.
Around it
- Software-defined radio — a PlutoSDR and a LibreSDR, for poking at the RF spectrum and learning how radios actually work.
- Microcontrollers — ESP32 and Raspberry Pi Pico W nodes that publish over MQTT.
- Sensing — GPS, I²S audio, and the same pH / EC / water-level probes that feed the hydroponics side of the house.
Why
It’s the maker version of the security habit: take something you don’t understand — a radio, a tensor accelerator, a noisy analog sensor — and keep poking until you do. Most of it talks MQTT back to the home lab, which is where the data eventually lands.