Raspberry Pi: Vizy AI camera raises over US$90,000 on Kickstarter

While NVIDIA has just released a cheaper version of the Jetson Nano, a board design for AI development, a company called Charmed Labs has brought a complete AI camera to Kickstarter. To date, Charmed Labs has released products like the Pixy and Pixy2 - cameras for Arduino and Raspberry Pi - but the Vizy is its most ambitious project yet.

Charmed Labs has based its 14 x 6.2 x 5 cm device on the Raspberry Pi 4, along with a high-resolution camera that can shoot in up to 300 FPS. The Vizy also supports accessories such as a zoom lens, an outdoor enclosure and a 4G/LTE modem should you wish to operate the device remotely.

The main selling point of the Vizy is that it can detect objects and animals through machine learning, allowing you to see when a squirrel is on a bird feeder, for example. According to the manufacturer, the Vizy processes all object detection onboard and does not process anything on external servers. The Vixy could also be used for optical character recognition (OCR) or slow-motion video capture. The Vizy is controlled via a web-browser UI and runs on Python application software, allowing you to customise it to your needs.

The Vizy has already received over US$90,000 in funding on Kickstarter. Charmed Labs hopes to deliver the Vizy to backers in January 2021 and claims that the device is 'mature and ready for production'. Nonetheless, the Vizy starts at US$229, which is quite expensive considering that Charmed Labs has used a Raspberry Pi 4, rather than a more powerful NVIDIA Jetson Nano.