Dear friends welcome to another Arduino Tutorial!
Today we are going to take a first look at
the impressive Arduino 101 board.
It is the first Arduino board that uses an
Intel Processor.
The board offers some amazing features like
a dual core processor and a Hardware Neural
Network for Artificial Intelligence applications.
Without any further delay, let’s get started!
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Today I am very excited because we are going
to play with this new board the Arduino 101.
This board was announced two years ago, and
it was released last year, but I just received
one.
It was designed to be the successor of the
Arduino Uno.
At first I was not impressed by the specs
of the board and I hesitated to order one.
But when a company like Intel enters the maker
community their offering must be unique.
So I decided to try it, mostly interested
in its Bluetooth connectivity.
Only when the board arrived I discovered that
inside the Intel Curie chip there is also
a Hardware Neural Network that we can use
in our projects!
Yes, that’s right!
We can develop Artificial Intelligence programs
with this board!
I really don’t know why Intel or Arduino
do not advertise this feature at all.
The board costs around 30$ and Gearbest.com
website was kind enough to send me a sample
board to test it.
You can find a link for this board in the
description of the video below.
At first let’s take a look at the board.
As you can see, the layout of the board is
exactly the same with the layout of the Arduino
Uno board.
The chip uses 3.3V logic level but it is 5V
tolerant.
On the board we can see the Intel Curie chip,
the Bluetooth Antenna some Logic level shifting
chips and a Flash Memory Chip.
The Intel Curie chip is really interesting.
I have created a simple table in order to
be easier to see the most important features
of this chip.
It was developed by Intel for low-power wearable
devices.
There are two processors inside this chip
both clocked at 32MHz.
There is an ARC RISC processor and an x86
Quark processor.
Both processors operate simultaneously.
The ARC core executes the programs we develop
and communicates with the x86 core that takes
care of the Bluetooth Low Energy stack and
USB communication.
The chip also offers Bluetooth LE connectivity,
24KBs of RAM memory, 196KBs of flash memory,
14 GPIO pins, SPI, I2C, UART, I2S busses,
up to 6 ADCs, Gyroscope, A six axis Accelerometer
and a Real Time Clock.
In my opinion the most interesting feature
the chip offers is the Pattern Matching Engine!
This Engine contains a 128 node Hardware Neural
Network.
The Neural Network has 2 modes, RBF (Radial
Basis Functions) and KNN (K Nearest Neighbors)
and two distance modes: L1 or LSUP.
The Neural Network has the following features:
• We can train a neuron with a 128byte vector
• We can save the knowledge in the network
• We can load the knowledge back into the
network
In other words with the Arduino 101 board
we can easily build Artificial Intelligence
programs.
Those programs will be executed really fast
because we will be using a dedicated hardware
Neural Network.
We can also feed this Neural Network with
data from the embedded sensors of the board
to train it!
Amazing stuff!
Science fiction becomes reality!
I will prepare a detailed tutorial on how
to use the Neural Network of the Arduino 101
because I find it fascinating.
I first need to study more about Neural Networks
and Machine Learning, so stay tuned!
We can build something really cool with this
board.
Compared to an Arduino Uno, the Arduino 101
is light years ahead!
The technology inside the Intel Curie chip
is very advanced!
As you can see it outperforms the Arduino
Uno in every field.
From the specs we can see the Arduino 101
operates at a frequency which is double of
the frequency that the Arduino Uno operates.
So, in theory the Arduino 101 must be at least
two times faster than the Arduino Uno.
But is that the case?
In order to find out, I prepared a simple
benchmark.
Both boards must calculate the Pi with the
same algorithm for the same number of iterations
of the Algorithm.
I have connected a small OLED display to display
the results.
As you can see the Arduino 101 needed 12,574
seconds to perform this task.
The Arduino Uno on the other hand needed 26,2
seconds.
That means the Arduino 101 is 2.1 times faster
than the Arduino Uno in this example.
In a future video I will perform a benchmark
with all the boards I have available right
now.
I expect that the ESP32 is going to be at
least 5 times faster the Arduino 101.
You can download the code of this simple benchmark
from a link in the description of the video.
The Arduino 101 since it is supported by Intel
has a good library support.
New libraries and example are posted frequently.
In order to use the board with the Arduino
IDE, you need to install some files.
Open the board manager and install the Arduino
101 package.
After the installation is complete you can
execute some of the examples that come with
the board.
I have loaded the “Motion Detect” example,
and as you can see when the board detects
movement is lights up this tiny LED.
With the examples provided you can start using
some of the advanced features of the board
right away.
Of course the Arduino 101 board is not perfect.
The biggest disadvantage of this board in
my opinion is its price.
Although I would happily spend 30$ just to
use the Neural Network, this board is not
attractive as an everyday board.
Also, the board lacks WiFi a very useful feature
that many more inexpensive boards offer.
For example the ESP32 chip with about 7$ offers
two cores, Wifi, Bluetooth and more memory.
I think the price of the Arduino 101 board
is the reason the board is not adopted by
many makers.
As consequence of that, many popular libraries
are not compatible with the Arduino 101.
Most of the displays we use are not supported
yet, and I don’t know if they ever will.
If there is not a strong community around
a board the software libraries will be limited,
and that’s the case with the Arduino 101.
So, who is it good for?
This board is great for prototyping wearable
projects.
It offers everything we need to build a project
that will use the embedded gyroscope and accelerometer
and will send the data in our cellphones wirelessly
using the Bluetooth connectivity it offers.
It is a great board for schools and education
in general.
Now that we now the board also features a
Hardware Neural Network inside, this board
is great for some simple Artificial Intelligence
projects.
That’s what I am going to test first, who
cares about Bluetooth when you can easily
implement some machine learning algorithms
in this chip?
The AI revolution is about to start, so we‘d
better learn as many things as we can about
it!
I would love to hear your opinion about this
board and about the Neural Network it offers.
Are you going to use this board in any of
your projects?
Please post your comments in the comments
section below and don’t forget to like the
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That’s it for today guys, thanks you very
much watching, I will see you in the next video!
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