Coral TPU (plus any future low cost AI Chip support)

I have a QNAP NAS and it allows you to use Coral TPU - Products | Coral but only really with their software (QuMagie), which actually sucks at deduplication and organising your photos.

There has been some noise on the PhotoPrism site about using not supporting a Coral TPU, some seemed to have managed a way to hook it in. (I couldnā€™t fathom it)

It supports TensorLite - Models  |  TensorFlow Lite

I personally would pay for the premium (plus) if this kind of support was there, especially if done in such a way you could leverage any ML you have at home, maybe with some sort of plugin architecture (Thinking also Nvidia 3D cards that are putting it out there nowā€¦ and still yet to play with myself)

Plus for those that like to do this kind of stuff all at home this kind of feature sits well thereā€¦ you may have a low powered PC but with a USB TPU chip or 3D card doing the classification and also identifying duplicates, would make this a powerful tool.

Thanks for posting, @tdaddy78 !

I thought the Coral was a compelling idea, and Iā€™ve tried several times to get my hands on one for at least a year now, and every supplier Iā€™ve found is so backordered that they wonā€™t even take reservations (if you have a link to a supplier, please share!).

The lack of availability for the device (even currently) means I really canā€™t prioritize any device supportā€“but the next release will have support for plug-in ā€œcuratorsā€ that can return both metadata and namespaced embeddings, so support could be added by anyone (and Iā€™ll happily host examples on this forum in a new section)

Edit 1: I just checked, and sketchy amazon sellers are scalping them for $78-100. Mouser has them for $62, but seems that you have to wait 10 weeks?

I also read several reviews that complain about the USB edition disconnecting regularly ā€“ do you have the device, and see this issue?

Edit 2: Mouser actually has them in stock currently, and I was able to order one ($8 shipping)!

Iā€™ll play with it when it gets delivered and update this thread with progress!

I got mine from (in Dec 2023) RS Components in UK it cost Ā£52 plus VAT and took a week. Seems like they have a small delay now on Back Order.

I think plugin is the way to go, really you just need to have conduit to offload the processing to ā€˜someotherā€™ chip and then it gets returned back to the service

So far had no disconnection issues its plugged direct into my (red) USB port. It seems to always work whenever I use it on the NAS.

Look forward to seeing the updates whn yours arrives.