Coral USB Accelerator Install on Pi

Hardware
1

Good day everyone - 1st post - my question is in regard to installing a Coral USB accelerator to my system - I have set up a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 2019 Quad Core 64 Bit WiFi Bluetooth (4GB) with Home Assistant as an add-on - I am using a Mac with my Pi - Out of the box I set up the Pi with an SD card with the HA OS - and it worked fine until I installed Frigate using the system cpu - the Frigate documentation strongly suggests not to use the CPU - the cure being the Coral USB - I recently elected to upgrade to an SSD using USB 3.0 which required changing the boot form SD to USB - I only found 1 thread that talks about installing the Coral while running the HA OS on the Pi ie from Home Assistant and their system does not recognize the Coral USB - their issue was not resolved. I am a novice and I will apologize ahead of time if my thoughts are wrong about this - but I was thinking and this is my question - the coral usb should be installed using the Raspberry Pi OS ? - In my case it would mean power down Pi - remove my USB HA SSD - flash a USB thumb drive (so I don’t have to change the boot to SD card) with Pi OS with Raspberry imager and then set up the Coral USB using Pi OS with the following steps -

Step 1 Install the Edge TPU runtime - after install attached Coral USB in USB 3.0 slot

Step 2 Install the PyCoral library

Step 3 Run a model on the Edge TPU - if all is good then I am finished - Lastly power down again and remove Pi OS drive and reattach my HA SSD drive - I am in no uncertain terms guessing how this has to be done - because I am a novice the only way this could be true is if all of the steps are installing to either the coral or Pi and could be therefore used with any OS - ie it becomes part of the Pi/Coral hardware setup -

So my question is am I off base here and if so how does one install this Coral USB running HA OS on my Pi ?

Thanks for any help

2

No need to bold your whole post :wink:

SSD + Coral, you are using an externally powered USB hub I hope. If not you will run into power probems.

The coral should work fine on HAOS, many people over on the HA Discord use that combination. Just plug it in and go.

Faffing about the way you’re proposing won’t do anything.

1 Like
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None of this needs to be done, Frigate handles all of it

4

Thanks Tinkerer - when I bought the Pi I purchased the OEM Raspberry Pi 15W USB-C Power Supply - do you think I still need the HUB - and if so any suggestions ? My Mac is 3.1 - I know the Pi is 3.0 just thinking futrure

5

The problem is that there’s a limit to how much power the Pi can provide to the USB ports, and it’s trivial to pass that. At that point you run into power stability warnings or corrupt file systems, or both.

You may not need the hub, but I’d be betting that with the SSD and Coral you’ll swiftly run into odd stability problems with your system, caused by a lack of power.

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I looked the the specs on the Coral which at Max speed can draw .9 amp and the Kingston SSD can draw .3 =. 1.2 amp The power supply can supply 3.0 Amps - the Pi 4 as per the manufacturer needs a minimum of 2.5 with allowing for a max or .5 amp for peripherals so if I am reading this correctly the pi can run at 2.5-.5 at 2 amps - my power supply is 3.0 A - the 1.2 draw of Coral and SSD drive - leaves only 1.8 for the Pi - I can see the issue - seems like the SSD drive would be fine on the Pi - going to need a USB power supply for the Coral - drawing .9 amp - looked at all the hubs on Amazon and the feedbacks always have someone sayiong the hubs have “back power” issues - I would love to know of one with no issues -

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Did you find an answer to this question?

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Also curious to know if this one got answered