There’s nothing more exciting than machine learning at the moment, so many people are focusing on upskilling themselves to incorporate this technology into their professional lives. For the lucky group that already has talent in this field, the wisest thing to do is to spread the word. Updating your resume and online professional profile is a good start, but Dave McKinnon has come up with an even better solution.
Rather than talk about his skills, which anyone can do, McKinnon decided to demonstrate them. He built a small business card that runs a small neural network entirely on the device. There are no APIs to connect to cloud services behind the scenes. Not bad for a 2″ x 3″ card, but it’s not completely self-contained, as it needs to be plugged into a USB-C port for power.
Most of the PCB is unused (📷: Dave McKinnon)
Two main decisions made this build possible. First, a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller was chosen to serve as the brain of the operation. No, a 125MHz dual-core Arm Cortex-M0 processor and 520KB of RAM isn’t much in the world of machine learning, but it’s more than enough for a simple, highly optimized model.
That leads to another decision that makes this card work. McKinnon developed a small neural network designed for speech recognition on an Arduino board. This is not very convenient. It can only distinguish between the numbers “1” to “9” and the words “on” and “off”, but the functionality is very small. That’s enough to comfortably fit within the RP2040’s hardware constraints.
Board of Directors Meeting (📷: Dave McKinnon)
A custom PCB was designed and McKinnon’s contact information was silkscreened on the front. The RP2040 came with flash memory, power conditioning circuitry, a microphone to capture human voice, and other supporting components. Once the model makes a prediction, the results are displayed on an improvised seven-segment display made of individual LEDs.
If you like this idea but want to make your cards a little more functional, check out the following: Writing a project. There’s plenty of detailed information to help you get started.
