03 CMU · Edge AI
Waste Classification on a Raspberry Pi 5
2024
Lede
Vision classifier squeezed onto a Pi 5 to run offline. The constraints ended up being more interesting than the model.
Detail
Set out to build a small camera-based waste sorter that could run without a network connection. The model isn't the interesting part — the constraints are. Throttling under thermal load, INT8 quantization that broke parts of the network on first try, the slightly different image stats from a cheap CSI camera. The takeaway: most of the work in a deployment-first ML project is not actually the model.
Stack
- ONNX
- Raspberry Pi 5
- OpenCV
- INT8 quantization