Sipeed M1W Dock Suite Kit

Yes, there are more affordable ways to use artificial intelligence with development kits.

Source

The Sipeed M1W is a cheap and powerful development board. I was introduced to this board during my internship. In the beginning, I didn’t know anything about it and was a bit nervous due to concerns about usage, resources, and help if needed. However, the FAQ page clearly explained every challenge I encountered. The board uses the K210 chip, which is customized for machine learning algorithms. You can do many things with this kit, from playing Mario to object detection. There are more advanced versions of the board, but I used this one at the start.

These are all the components of the kit. You can access the screen, camera, and board — everything except the SD card, which is not included in the kit, so you’ll need to purchase one separately.

After accessing the kit, I encountered some setup issues. I watched some videos and checked various resources, so now I have enough information to explain it to you.

There are two programs for using this kit: one for installing the firmware and running trained models, called Kflash_GUI, and another for coding the board using MicroPython, called MaixPy IDE.

Note: On the firmware page, there are many different options. Please read the explanations for the firmwares carefully, as each one supports different features.

Firmwares Page: https://dl.sipeed.com/shareURL/MAIX/MaixPy/release/master/maixpy_v0.6.3_2_gd8901fd22

MaixPy IDE Page: https://wiki.sipeed.com/soft/maixpy/en/get_started/env_maixpyide.html

Kflash_gui Page: https://github.com/sipeed/kflash_gui

Also, there is a GitHub page for a quick start guide to using the different features of the kit: GitHub — Sipeed Wiki

Maixhub

For the machine learning side, there is a page owned by Sipeed called MaixHub. This is a powerful tool for training models, sharing models, and using different models from other users. I used this website to train various models, and the process was easy, even using my phone’s camera. Unfortunately, the Maix M1W board doesn’t support using its own camera for training, but phone images work well.

That’s all for now. I have some additional information, but I want to finish this paper here. If you want to know anything else, please leave a comment, and I will add it and provide an answer if I know it.