Guide: Pineboards Hat AI! Coral TPU on Raspberry Pi 5 for Frigate

[glossyio]

I saw a couple questions and no other mentions of this setup, so I wanted to share a guide about how I got Frigate Docker on the RPi5 working with the Pineboards PCIe Coral Hat. This setup allows me to run a [single] M.2 E-Key Google Coral Edge TPU (likely extends to dual model but haven't tried it) on the Pineboards HatDrive!.

Steps

Assuming a fresh RPi OS install (currently bookworm), follow these steps mostly pulled from pineboards.io instructions:

1. Update your RPi5 firmware. Check with sudo rpi-eeprom-update. It needs to be dated 2023-12-06 or newer.
2. Configure Google Coral Edge TPU for the RPi5. Before you start, confirm you have Kernel version 6.6.30 or higher is needed for the Pineboards Hat Ai overlay. Check with uname -a.
3. Check that everything installed properly per the Coral.ai m2 get started docs:
   • Once rebooted, verify that the accelerator module is detected: lspci -nn | grep 089a. You should see something like this: 03:00.0 System peripheral: Device 1ac1:089a
   • Also verify that the PCIe driver is loaded: ls /dev/apex_0. You should simply see the name repeated back: /dev/apex_0
4. Set up Frigate Docker file to pass-through the device; e.g.

    devices:
      - /dev/apex_0:/dev/apex_0

5. Set up Frigate config to use the pci detector; e.g.

detectors: 
  coral_pci:
    type: edgetpu
    device: pci

6. Start your container and enable detection.

Thoughts

Some thoughts on using the Hat vs. USB:

• MSRP cost for single HatDrive!+m.2 key is about equal with a USB accelerator (but some major potential advantages below).
• Potential to use a Dual m.2 key (I haven't tried this).
• The HatDrive! also has space for an NVMe drive (I haven't tried this), to add super speedy storage in addition to the TPU.