What are the numbers of cars, bicycles and people per hour on a given thoroughfare? What are the speeds of these cars, bicycles and people? Are giraffes visiting the feeder that you installed in your backyard? And how long are they staying? Vizy's operation can be summarized with this flowchart: You can think of Vizy as a powerful platform for AI, scientific and vision applications and a great way to become familiar with and learn AI and image processing.

When the Raspberry Pi 4 burst onto the scene, with four 1.5 GHz CPU cores and up to 8GB of RAM there was a gasp from the community. The extra horsepower provided those interested in machine learning and AI to finally use the Raspberry Pi to power their projects. Over time, TensorFlow and TensorFLow Lite saw numerous upgrades and finally cemented the Raspberry Pi as the ideal low cost introduction to the topic. The problem is, where do we start? Vizy from Charmed Labs, starting at $259 for a unit that comes with a Raspberry Pi 4 2GB or $269 - $299 for 4 or 8GB, is a smart camera for those starting out with machine learning.

Vizy is a Linux-based "AI camera" based on the Raspberry Pi 4 that uses machine learning and machine vision to pull off some neat tricks, and has a design centered around hackability. I found it ridiculously simple to get up and running, and it was just as easy to make changes of my own, and start getting ideas. I was running pre-installed examples written in Python within minutes, and editing that very same code in about 30 seconds more. Even better, I did it all without installing a development environment, or even leaving my web browser, for that matter. I have to say, it made for a very hacker-friendly experience.