Adafruit is very well known in the maker and electronics community. For 15 years the New York-based company has provided kits and boards for Arduino, Beaglebone and Raspberry Pi and their latest board is the $39.95 BrainCraft HAT. Designed for use with the Raspberry Pi 4, this HAT is a hub of inputs and outputs, including a screen that shows image recognition, to facilitate machine learning Raspberry Pi projects. If you are keen to try out machine learning projects using TensorFlow Lite then the Raspberry Pi 4 is the ideal machine for taking your first steps. It is cheap to buy, has plenty of power and adaptable to your needs.

The BrainCraft HAT has a 240×240 TFT IPS display for inference output, slots for camera connector cable for imaging projects, a 5 way joystick and button for UI input, left and right microphones, stereo headphone out, stereo 1 W speaker out, three RGB DotStar LEDs, two 3 pin STEMMA connectors on PWM pins so they can drive NeoPixels or servos, and Grove/STEMMA/Qwiic I2C port.

The idea behind the BrainCraft HAT is that you'd be able to "craft brains" for Machine Learning on the EDGE, with Microcontrollers & Microcomputers. On ASK AN ENGINEER, our founder & engineer chatted with Pete Warden, the technical lead of the mobile, embedded TensorFlow Group on Google's Brain team about what would be ideal for a board like this. And here's what we designed! The BrainCraft HAT has a 240 240 TFT IPS display for inference output, slots for camera connector cable for imaging projects, a 5 way joystick and button for UI input, left and right microphones, stereo headphone out, stereo 1 W speaker out, three RGB DotStar LEDs, two 3 pin STEMMA connectors on PWM pins so they can drive NeoPixels or servos, and Grove/STEMMA/Qwiic I2C port. This will let people build a wide range of audio/video AI projects while also allowing easy plug-in of sensors and robotics!