The i.MX RT700 microcontroller family includes an eIQ Neutron N3-64 NPU for accelerating neural network models. The i.MX RT700 EVK can be combined with a camera and LCD screen to showcase running TinyML vision models on a microcontroller.
i.MX RT700 Camera Hardware Setup:
The following hardware is used:
- i.MX RT700 EVK
- RK055HDMIPI4MA0 LCD panel
- Camera Options:
- USB Camera with USB A to micro-B converter
- OV7670 parallel camera (with optional wide-angle lens)
The USB camera should be attached to the i.MX RT700 EVK on USB OTG port J40.
The parallel camera interface is available on J53 and uses FlexIO with eDMA to read in the camera data. AN14836 describes the details. Note that the links in that app note for the demo software do not work but the demo code is in the process of being posted on NXP’s Application Code Hub.
When inserting the parallel camera align it to the left most side, as shown in the image below:
Directions for attaching the LCD panel to the J52 connector on the underside of the i.MX RT700 EVK can be found on this Community post. Note that there are multiple names used for the LCD panel and all these part numbers refer to the exact same panel:
- RK055HDMIPI4MA0
- RK055MHD091
- RK055MHD091-CTG
- RK055MHD091A0-CTG
i.MX RT700 Vision ML Examples:
There are two vision AI/ML examples for i.MX RT700 available today:
- Object Detection (part of AN14718)
- Hand Gesture Recognition
Both of these examples use a USB camera.
i.MX RT700 Vision MPP Examples:
The Media Processing Pipeline (MPP) interference examples in i.MX RT700 MCUXpresso SDK 26.06 and later support both parallel and USB camera interfaces. These SDK examples are only available for command line GCC and VS Code MCUXpresso SDK layouts. They are not available for MCUXpresso IDE, IAR, or Keil.
A parallel camera is used by default in the RT700 MPP projects. A USB camera can be enabled by adding a USE_USB_CAMERA declaration in the project's CMakeLists.txt file by adding the following macro: