14 DAY TRIAL // Google announced over the weekend the general availability of Mendel Linux 4.0 "Day," the company's in-house built, Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution for its Coral Dev Board and System-on-Module (SoM).
Revealed earlier this year as a Raspberry Pi rival, Google's Coral Dev Board single-board computer (SBC) and System-on-Module (SoM) just received a much-improved, more stable and up-to-date Mendel Linux OS, which is based on the latest Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster" operating system series and ships with Linux kernel 4.14 LTS, Python 3.7, and U-Boot 2017.03.3, as well as upgraded GStreamer, OpenCV, and OpenCL components.
"We've also made it possible to use the Dev Board's GPU to convert YUV to RGB pixel data at up to 130 frames per second on 1080p resolution, which is one to two orders of magnitude faster than on Mendel Linux 3.0 release Chef," said Carlos Mendonça, Product Manager, Coral Team. "These changes make it possible to run inferences with YUV-producing sources such as cameras and hardware video decoders."
How to upgrade your Coral SBC to Mendel Linux 4.0
Google urges all Coral SBC users to upgrade their Dev Board or SoM to Mendel Linux 4.0 "Day" as soon as possible by following their internal documentation on how to flash a new system image, which is currently only possible on GNU/Linux and macOS platforms. However, before flashing a new image, users should keep in mind that all system and local data will be deleted during the installation process.
In related news, Google also announced updates to its MediaPipe open-source and cross-platform framework for building multi-modal machine learning perception pipelines for the Coral Dev Board, which allows users to run on-device machine learning models for processing of streaming data like video and audio, as well as a new Teachable Sorter tutorial on how to build a free-fall sorter using Coral.