Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute software developer kit (NCSDK) setup for Raspberry Pi

Prerequisites

1. Movidius Neural Compute Stick
2. Raspberry Pi
3. SD card reader
4. A linux computer, of couse ; )

Installation

1. Fisrt, download and burn Raspbian Stretch image to your SD card. (instructions)
2. Insert SD card into Raspberry Pi and power on
3. Install NCSDK, follow the instructions below

git clone git://gitlab.com/ggml/rpi-ncsdk
cd rpi-ncsdk

bash ./install.sh

Verify

To verify if the installation process is succeed do the following :

1. Open a terminal and change directory to the ncsdk-${NCSDK_VER}/examples/apps/hello_ncs_py base directory
2. Type the following command in the terminal: make run

When the application runs normally and is able to connect to the NCS device the output will be similar to this:

Hello NCS! Device opened normally.
Goodbye NCS! Device closed normally.
NCS device working.

Install OpenCV from source (optional)

bash ./install_opencv_from_source.sh

Enable auto-expand rootfs at first boot (optional)

1. Mount your SD card boot and rootfs partitions
2. Execute command bellow to enable expand rootfs at first boot once

bash ./resize_bootfs_once.sh

Configure Raspbian Firmware (optional)

1. Mount your SD card boot partition
2. Execute command bellow configure Raspbian Firmware

➜ bash ./config_fw.sh

Firmware configuration Tool

Disable Wireless LAN? ([Y], n): y
Disable Bluetooth? ([Y], n): y
Disable Audio? ([Y], n): y
GPU memory in megabytes (defaults to 64): 128
Enable camera with v4l2 driver bcm2835-v4l2 ([Y], n): y
Done!

Resize rootfs partition (optional)

1. Turn off your Raspberry and insert SD card into a linux machine
2. Use Gparted to resize your rootfs partition to minimum size report of resize2fs -P: 1360M

$ sudo e2fsck -f /dev/sdc2
✹ ✭
e2fsck 1.44.1 (24-Mar-2018)
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Pass 5: Checking group summary information
rootfs: 142488/360448 files (0.2% non-contiguous), 1022661/1435648 blocks

# Estimate minimum size
$ sudo resize2fs -P /dev/sdc2
✹ ✭
resize2fs 1.44.1 (24-Mar-2018)
Estimated minimum size of the filesystem: 1393468
# 1393468 blocks * 512 bytes/1024/1024
# => Minimum required 680M * 2 = 1360M

# Resize partition to as minimum as posible
$ sudo resize2fs -M /dev/sdc2
✹ ✭
resize2fs 1.44.1 (24-Mar-2018)
Resizing the filesystem on /dev/sdc2 to 1393468 (4k) blocks.
The filesystem on /dev/sdc2 is now 1393468 (4k) blocks long.

# Get SD card information
$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc
✹ ✭
Disk /dev/sdc: 29.7 GiB, 31914983424 bytes, 62333952 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x25948bd0

Device     Boot Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sdc1        8192    98045    89854 43.9M  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sdc2       98304 11249663 11151360  5.3G 83 Linux
# => dd's bs=512 count=11249663

# Check partition again
sudo e2fsck -f /dev/sdc2                                             ✹ ✭
e2fsck 1.44.1 (24-Mar-2018)
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Pass 5: Checking group summary information
rootfs: 142103/352256 files (0.2% non-contiguous), 1012224/1393920 blocks

Backup image

I use dd¹ command for backup and restore tasks and Pipe Viewer ² for stats.

# Replace ${sdX} by your SD card
# Backup
sudo dd if=/dev/${sdX} bs=1M count=${number_of_megabytes} | pv --rate --timer --progress --size xxxM | gzip -9 > path_to_backup_file.gzip
# 4862 ± sudo dd if=/dev/sdc bs=512 count=11249663 | pv --rate --timer --progress --size=5493M  | gzip -9 > /workspace/Backup/rpi-ncsdk/2.05.00.02_11249663_5493M.gz                                 ✹ ✭
# 11249663+0 records in============================================================>  ] 99%
# 11249663+0 records out
# 5759827456 bytes (5.8 GB, 5.4 GiB) copied, 541.752 s, 10.6 MB/s
# 0:09:01 [10.1MiB/s] [============================================================>  ] 99%

# restore
gunzip -c path_to_backup_file.gzip | pv | sudo dd of=/dev/${sdX}
# dd if=5656M.img | pv --rate --timer --progress --size 5656M | sudo dd of=/dev/sdc