The moment I saw the Framework laptop and the expansion card system I knew I have to make something. First I was thinking of making a raspberry pico card, ethernet, LTE or magnet charger, but since all of them were being done by the amazing community I thought I could not provide anything to the table.
However, while I was training an ML model on my laptop I was frustrated by how slow it was going. (I have HP Folio 9480m) A friend of mine saw me having a bad time and gave me a Google Coral USB Accelerator which sped up the training process substantially. After some time I went online to buy one for myself and saw on the website that the Accelerator Module was being sold.
Accelerator Module
I cannot put an image of the module (I am new user) so trust me when I say it is tiny but powerful
The module is a 120-pin LGA chip which scared me at first. 120 small lanes and all the supporting components can’t fit into an expansion card, can they? It turns out this chip has 104 pins that are either 3.3V or GND. From the other 16 pins, you can run the module using only 7 pins. So yeah… it’s not only doable but with the example schematics provided by Coral and Framework, it is 15 min work.
The PCB
I present you the Framework Coral Accelerator Card:
Oh my god, you are a genius. I was just thinking of this idea because I ordered a new Framework and had doubts about Neural Networks but seeing this is already created is great.
Can’t wait to try this as soon as my Framework arrives and Google Coral cards are available again
Looks like the earliest the chips are available is January 2023. What is the difference between Google’s dev boards and this module? Is this module only good for executing models and not training them (like the dev board can)?
The feedback we got from Google on this is that it’s useful to get orders in at Mouser, since they’ve been able to fulfill some earlier than the indicated lead time.
To those registering notifications on Mouser: does clicking the “Notify me when product is in stock.” link do anything? I clicked it multiple times and nothing is happening on any of their products.
Looks like it is Firefox related since it works perfectly on Chromium.
Hey, this looks like a really interesting project.
I would be interested to see what kind of creative projects people would come up with, as a laptop isn’t your typical machine learning platform. I guess art and research applications? Possibly interfacing with other expansion cards that utilize machine learning?
One thing I saw when researching this is the (usb version) of the coral accelerator is recommended for use with Debian Linux. Not sure if that would apply to your hardware? Fortunately, Debian runs on framework laptops.
I use a framework laptop with a USB Coral for development on https://frigate.video. I will be trying to get my hands on something like this as soon as possible.
Amazingly, it seems these are still backordered everywhere. Just about every other chip and module is in a severe excess state, so it’s unclear what the constraint is for these.
