Pysapien Changes

It has come to our attention that maybe, just maybe pushing the raspberry pi 02w to it's limits with the Google coral edge TPU is underwhelming and difficult. Luckily, 7 days ago, a board released from Raxda that solves this issue.

Pysapien X is now in progress. It will utilize the Raxda cubie a7z with the allwinner a733 SoC. It is perfect for this robot, but comes with some huge caveats.

FIRST- NEW SPECS

First off, the specs. The board has a dual core cluster of A76 cores at 2.0 GHZ and a hexa core cluster of a55s (Undetermined frequency, probably 1.5 GHz). This ensures a large language model can run on the computer and the robot can move with more control.

It's got a GPU with openCL 3.0, openGLES 3.2 and Vulkan 1.3 . The GPU should be about 120 GFLOPS. This means that the graphical capabilities of Pysapien X are vastly superior. It should be capable of ray traced demos and every effect imaginable. The robot would also make a great desktop PC.

The A733 also features a Vivante VIP9000 NPU for computer vision and neutral network tasks. It is capable of 3 TOPS.

With 1 to 16 GB of RAM, the robot's main board supports a wide variety of budgets, and can run LLMS locally, or on a server.

Having all of these features integrated into one board is convenient, efficient and cheap. Reliability concerns of the old TPU and Pi stack have been fixed. Just don't use that garbage.

SECOND- ATTACHED HARDWARE

The Raxda Cubie a7z has some oddities. Since only 10 software PWM channels exist, the robot will be using a 16 pin I2C PWM board. The computer moves around back to get the best cooling, and the audio and PWM board go around front. The PCF8574 will be removed, making interactions much faster, using true interrupts (eventually).

The display will be upgraded to a ST7735 on an overclocked SPI Bus. The display will be set as a frame buffer output for buttery smooth MP4 play back at 35 to 45 FPS (Depending on dirty block updates). The UI will be powered by PyGame SDL2, layering thousands of elements at smooth frame rates and GPU acceleration. Bokeh blurs and glassy themes will be possible. The graphical capabilities of Pysapien X will be insane.

The type c port also allows for type c docks, turning the robot into a desktop computer with one plug.

PART 3- GOTCHAS AND ISSUES

Now since the Raxda cubie a7z is literally 7 days old, support is spotty. Pysapien X will very likely lay down frameworks that people will use for the board's entire lifespan. The A733 processor's Vivante NPU is also very new. Models have not been quantized for it yet, and it may take some effort.

The board's camera connector is also virtually unsupported as of now. The camera will be USB.

I'm sure there are some other nightmares to deal with, but leave that up to me. A pre-made SD card will be downloadable on the internet so all you have to do is put the robot together, pop in your SD card and it comes to life.