Developing an AI IoT application with open software on a RISC-V SoC

RISC-V is an emergent architecture that is gaining strength in low-power IoT applications. The stabilization of the architectural extensions and the start of commercialization of RISC-V based SOCs, like the Kendryte K210, raises the question of whether this open standard will facilitate the development of applications in specific markets or not.In this paper we evaluate the development environments, the toolchain, the debugging processes related to the Sipeed MAIX Go development board, as well as the standalone SDK and the Micropython port for the Kendryte K210. The training pipeline for the built-in convolutional neural network accelerator, with support for Tiny YOLO v2, has also been studied. In order to evaluate all the above aspects in depth, two low-cost, low-power, IoT edge applications based on AI have been developed. The first one is capable of recognizing movement in a house and autonomously identify whether it was caused by a human or by a house pet, like for example a dog or a cat. In the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic, the second application is capable of labeling whether a pedestrian is wearing a face mask or not, doing real-time object recognition at a mean rate of 13 FPS. Throughout the process, we can conclude that, despite the potential of the hardware and its excellent performance/cost ratio, the documentation for developers is scarce, the development environments are in low maturity levels, and the debugging processes are sometimes nonexistent